U. Denver Law gets endowed Marijuana Professorship
Higher Ed bubble heads.
Okay, now they’ve gone and done it.
Colorado Law Week reports:
The University of Denver Sturm College of Law will continue leading legal marijuana education with an investment from Denver-based law firm Vicent Sederberg.
The law school announced today that Vicent Sederberg made a $45,000 commitment to enable one faculty member to serve as the Vicente Sederberg Professor of Marijuana Law and Policy.
“As the marijuana industry expands in Colorado and around the nation and the world, there is a growing need for attorneys qualified to represent business owners,” Vicente Sederberg founding partner and DU Sturm College of Law alumnus Brian Vicente said in a press release. “With the launch of this professorship, Sturm College of Law will be taking the lead in providing law students the training they need to enter this new field. We are proud to be able to support their efforts in this area.”
The Denver Business Journal elaborates:
“This was a very personal decision for me and my firm,” said Brian Vicente, whose firm has been a leader in marijuana policy reform.
Vicente attended DU’s law school on a full merit scholarship and was encouraged by his professors, he said, to pursue drug policy reform.
“I want to give back to the university who supported me,” he said.
DU law professor Sam Kamin, who has been working on marijuana law reform for about six years, will head up the marijuana policy program. The position is funded for three years with the option to renew.
As humorous as it sounds, there is a logic to it. Pot is big legal business, and getting bigger. In an age when law school grads have trouble finding jobs, why hot prepare them to, um, uh, oh never mind.
[Featured Image: Cheech and Chong 1972]
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Comments
“Ask not for whom the period bell tolls, it tolls for weed.”
Douglas Ginsburg call your office.
It doesn’t seem like very much money.
$45,000 buys a LOT of Cheetos.
Go ahead. Legalize it. Then watch the FDA put it behind the counter.
Dope lawyers.
I dunno… Seems like maybe a bad PR move…
This doesn’t seem at all odd.
Law School faculty are supposed to be researching new frontiers in law.
In Colorado, decriminalization of marijuana is complicated — particularly in its interactions with federal law.
There’s got to be enough there to take the full-time research of one law school faculty member in the state.
Not sure why CO has been at the bleeding edge here, and not WA. But, it sure seems to have been. It turns out to have been a lot more difficult than expected getting the regulatory scheme up and running. For example, I don’t think that anyone expected that marijuana edibles would be nearly as dangerous as they turned out to be. Far worse than the pot brownies that everyone was probably expecting.
Even if the market participants can get over the state, county, and city hurdles, the hurdles at the federal level seem to be growing larger all the time. Awhile back, we learned that the banking regulators were greatly discouraging banks from servicing this industry. More recently, we find that the IRS is greatly involved, disallowing many normal business expenses, and penalizing these businesses because they utilize too much cash (thanks to the federal banking regulators that don’t allow them banking privileges).
I should note that I voted for the CO laws, and then local regulations, though I don’t expect to personally benefit from the law.
Well, it is going to be a fairly active area of law. I mean since they already have a Second Amendment faculty position…
You mean they don’t? Why, I would think a fine, upstanding university such as U-Denver would have been first to support one of our most treasured and endangered freedoms that even the founding fathers took time to enshrine into an amendment, right next to the one protecting your right to smoke whatever plants you want.
Unless it’s tobacco. In which case, you’re a hater.
/sarc
Endowed chair, no. But, DU does have David Kopel as an adjunct from the Independence Institute (and Volokh Conspiracy) teaching and writing about the 2nd Amdt.
I wonder if his coursework will also includes a lab class.
Puff the hallucinating professor.
Swell. Dext up, “Foundation for a Desert Ride on a Horse With No Name.”