As you likely recall, in November, citizens of Colorado voted to pass Amendment 64, allowing personal use and regulation of marijuana for adults 21 and over.  As the Amendment 64 task force deals with the bureaucratic jungle of the enforcement regulations and guidelines, people want to know if employers can regulate employee marijuana use off the clock. And according to the text of the amendment, they can. Some argue that employer policies could essentially nullify the effect of the amendment for everyone who’s employed. So what?

The statutory language is pretty clear and pretty broad, saying, “Nothing in this section is intended to require an employer to permit or accommodate the use, consumption, possession ... of marijuana in the workplace or to affect the ability of employers to have policies restricting the use of marijuana by employees."

So, employers get to determine if they feel like accepting marijuana use from their employees. Sounds like the type of decision typically left to the employer. Just because the state law allows something doesn’t mean an employer has to. There isn’t a Colorado law requiring that everyone wear pants in public, but most employers probably have some kind of dress code. Apples and oranges, you say? Maybe.

Throughout the legalization of marijuana debate, proponents of legalization have argued that marijuana should be treated like alcohol: regulated, taxed, and available only to those over a certain age. So, to compare fruits, what employer tells employees they can’t drink on or off the clock?

We aren’t saying it can’t happen. Just that it typically doesn’t. Employers generally don’t deal with the details of that kind of thing. As the above editorial suggests, many employers simply don’t have the time or interest to be lifestyle police. This doesn’t mean they can’t or won’t. It just means it’s rare.

What the amendment doesn’t say is that employer policies have to make sense. Sure, we’d like to think employers would create policies that are prudent and reasonable and logical, but do they have to? Aren’t they allowed to create draconian policies? After all, it’s their place of business. Their house, their rules. You just work there.

If you go out in public and make an ass of yourself in some capacity, and you can be linked back to the company, you’re probably going to face some repercussions at work. The law doesn’t require that your company has to have a policy saying “hey don’t go out in public and make an ass of yourself” for this to happen. That guy that got fired for yelling at a Chick Fil A employee probably didn’t have a clause in the employee handbook saying it was against company policy to yell at Chick Fil A employees.

And yet, most of us can agree that in some respects, that guy getting fired makes sense. So what’s the difference in that and marijuana (or alcohol) prohibition policies? Having company executives clearly and publicly display their idiocy is bad for a company’s reputation. Namby Pamby and BL1Y drinking at home and recording Blind Drunk Justice hardly merit the same concern.

So, yeah, Colorado employers can create policies that prohibit employees from using marijuana off the clock. And yeah, we’d like if they made sense. But they probably don’t have to. After all, who’s going to protest? If you don’t want to comply, they can find someone who will.

Besides, if an employer tries to take things too far, the ACLU or a pro-pot group will likely step up and challenge the policy anyway. So relax. Let the employer go nuts.

So this year out State of the Union drinking game was a bit off, though you'd still get pretty smashed just from the deficit and our children. Next year we're probably just going to do shots every time the president says "And that is why I am proposing a new..." Do a second shot if he offers no explanation as to what that thing he just proposed is.

But now the speech is over, and so it's time to analyze the dumbest thing said, but first we'll take a look at a doozy from Marco Rubio's response:

Every dollar our government borrows is money that isn't being invested to create jobs. And the uncertainty created by the debt is one reason why many businesses aren't hiring.

Technically speaking, this is true. When we borrow a dollar, that's a dollar that China can't use to invest and create jobs. Although, borrowing by definition means someone else is investing... but never mind that. When our government gets more money, that's more it can spend on initiatives that will help create jobs. What he probably meant was that when we raise revenue by taxes (not borrowing) that our people have less to invest and spend in the economy. We're quite confident that's what the message was intended to be, since it's the message Romney ran on, and the Republic response to the SOTU was little more than trying to rerun the last election. Spoiler GOP: You lost, time to maybe get a new message.

Even correcting Rubio's statement, that every dollar our government raises in taxes is money that isn't being invested to create jobs is also not true. Wealthy people, the ones Obama wants to raise taxes on, do spend a lot of money investing, but they also horde money. Dollars sitting in some rich person's bank account are not being spent on investments.

Rich corporations aren't any better. In fact, they're worse. They have to deal with quarterly earnings reports which forces them to focus on short term gains rather than long term investments which might drive them into the red for a few years before the investments pay off. This is why Dell recently was taken private, to free the company up for doing long term projects without pressure from stockholders for a quick turnaround.

The federal government does waste a whole lot of money, but it's simply not true that every dollar it taxes and spends is a dollar that would have been invested in the market. Tax from the right people and spend on the right projects, and the government can strengthen the economy. We're just left with the question of whether it will actually do that, and whether Rubio's speech writer understands the difference between taxes and loans.

Moving on to the President's silliest line:

Together, we have cleared away the rubble of crisis, and can say with renewed confidence that the state of our union is stronger.

How much stronger exactly?

We know our economy is stronger when we reward an honest day’s work with honest wages.  But today, a full-time worker making the minimum wage earns $14,500 a year.  Even with the tax relief we’ve put in place, a family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. [...]

Tonight, let’s also recognize that there are communities in this country where no matter how hard you work, it’s virtually impossible to get ahead.  Factory towns decimated from years of plants packing up.  Inescapable pockets of poverty, urban and rural, where young adults are still fighting for their first job.

Minimum wage is $7.25, and if you're working 2000 hours, that comes out to $14,500. The minimum wage in 2009, before Obama's rubble clearing began, was also $7.25. (The bill bringing it up from $6.55 was passed in 2007, under Bush, but didn't take effect until July 2009.) Had minimum wage kept pace with inflation, a person earning min wage would be making an extra $1000 a year, and when you're earning $14,500, that's a whole lot of extra money.

For those people at the bottom, the state of our union isn't stronger. Maybe they could have used that extra thousand bucks to pack up and move out of their inescapable pocket of poverty.

Yesterday NPR briefly discussed jobs with the smallest and largest gender pay gaps. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they showed numbers for 11 jobs in each category.

Just in case you need the reminder, the wage gender gap is the difference in what men and women in the same position earn as a wage. Self selection blah blah maternity leave blah blah blah, the gap can be exaggerated, but even the most conservative analysis still shows there is a wage gap.

The biggest gap is with insurance sales agents, with women earning 62.5% of what men earn; the smallest is for pharmacists, earning 99.6% of what men earn. Beyond that, the gap opens in the other direction, with women earning 2.6% more than men as counselors, and 3.7% more as health care technicians. The national average across all positions is 80.9%.

For paralegals and legal assistants in 2012, women earned 94.1% of what men do, putting them in a pretty good position, comparatively speaking. Female lawyers do slightly worse, at 91.9%, but still cut the national gap in half. So, pat yourselves on the backs, law firms. You’ve still got a ways to go, but you’re considerably less discriminatory than the rest of the nation.

And now for the bad news.

Looking at the trend in gaps across different fields may reveal something lawyers don’t want to hear. Generally speaking, jobs with the highest gaps were related to sales, marketing, and education, jobs where the personality of the employee is key to success. On the other end, jobs with the smallest gaps were more mechanical. Not machinist, but jobs where employees are fungible, such as data entry, pharmacy, cafeteria workers, and warehouse clerks.

For all the talk about “creative problem solving” and being “a good fit” and “personal brands” (gag), based on pay disparities it looks like legal practice is pretty rote, and all that really matters is your ability to churn out form documents and fill up your time sheets. The reason gender makes less of a difference in law is not because lawyers are so educated, or so progressive. Your gender makes less of a difference because you make less of a difference.

So, congratulations women. You’re making headway in a profession that will soon be dominated by robots (as if you don’t already think that about your coworkers). But look on the bright side, at least the fembots will get fair compensation.

Back in the 1990s, the ABA got slapped across the mouth by the Justice Department for engaging in all sorts of anti-competitive practices, like mandating that every professor work no more than 3 hours a day, get summers and alternating semesters off, and have access to no fewer than three adorable puppies twice a week. The DoJ filed suit, and the ABA folded and entered into a consent decree that would govern their actions for the next ten years.

Among the new regulations were rules that the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, the Accreditation Committee, and the Standards Review Committee would be composed of no more than 50% deans and professors. It's a pretty good rule. You do need deans and profs on these committees, because they bring important insight and expertise to the whole legal education thing, but the consent decree wanted to make sure that there wasn't regulatory capture.

So, years after the consent decree stopped being in force, what happened to the composition of these three bodies?

Section of Legal Education

Kent Syverud - Dean, Washington University School of Law

Solomon Oliver, Jr. - Chief Judge, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Ohio [Also professor from 1982-1994 at Cleveland Marshall College of Law, and associate dean there from 1991-1994]

Joan Howland - Associate Dean and Professor, University of Minnesota Law School

Raymond C. Pierce - Partner, Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough LLP [Also dean of NCCU from 2005-2012]

John F. O'Brien - Dean, New England Law|Boston

Jane H. Aiken - Professor and Director of the Community Justice Project, Georgetown University Law Center

Rebecca White Berch - Chief Justice, Arizona Supreme Court [Also Director of the Legal Writing Program at Arizona State from 1986-1991 and 1994-1995]

Leo A. Brooks - Retired Army General, and formerly assistant professor of military science at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio

Paulette Brown - Partner and Chief Diversity Officer, Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP

Edwin J. Butterfoss - Associate Dean and Professor, Hamline University Law School

Michael J. Davis - Professor, University of Kansas School of Law

Antonio García-Padilla - Dean Emeritus and Professor, University of Puerto Rico School of Law

Tracy Allen Giles, Esq. - Partner, Giles & Lambert, P.C.

James M. Klein - Distinguished Visiting Professor, Charleston School of Law

Cynthia Nance - Dean Emeritus & Nathan G. Gordon Professor of Law, University of Arkansas School of Law (Fayetteville),

Jequita H. Napoli - Special Judge, Cleveland County District Court, Norman, Oklahoma

Gregory G. Murphy - Attorney, Billings, Montana

Maureen A. O’Rourke - Dean, Boston University School of Law

Erika Robinson - Law Student Division Member, University of South Carolina School of Law, J.D. Candidate, 2013

Morgan T. Sammons - Dean, California School of Professional Psychology, Alliant International University

Edward N. Tucker - CPA/ABV, Ellin & Tucker

Total

Current law profs/deans: 11

Former law profs/deans: 3

Non-law profs: 2

Other: 6

Being generous to the ABA, the Section is 50% law profs and deans. But, counting current and former law profs we get 64%.

The Accreditation Committee is 9 current law profs and deans, 2 former, 3 non-law professors, and 5 others. So, 47% current, and 58% current and former.

For the Standards Review Committee, things are even worse. 8 current law profs and deans, 1 former, 1 non-law professor, and 4 others. 57% current profs, and 64% current and former. And two of those non-professors hold executive offices at universities that have a law school. So if you want to count current profs, former profs, and others with a direct interest in law schools, we're up to 79%.

Anyone who's ever studied corporate governance will know that it doesn't even take 50% of the votes to have control. 50% means that the rest of the people in the room need to be a united front against you, which is rare, and you can effectively exercise control with a pretty small voting block. Not that professors are necessarily a united front, but when proposals are on the table that will slash their pay and result in massive layoffs (such as reducing law school to a 2 year program) you can bet that the Department of Justice was right not trust professors to govern themselves.