I am interrupting my series of blog posts on “legal positivism” to share my most recent work-in-progress, which is titled “Teaching Tiger King“–a rough draft of which is also available here via the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). I have added my teaching assistants Christy Champnella, Ben Mayo, Morgan Travers, and Antonella Vitulli as co-authors, since their work was instrumental to the success of the course. (As a further aside, here is a link to our syllabus.) In brief, our paper can be summed up as follows: when life gives you lemons (e.g. stay-at-home orders and all online college courses), add some water and sugar to make lemonade (e.g. find a way of using the majestic non-human animals as well as the crazy and colorful characters depicted in the hit Netflix show Tiger King to explore law and ethics). Or if you prefer the formal abstract of our paper, see below:

When our home institution moved all instruction online in response to the global pandemic, we began redesigning our business law survey course from scratch. Specifically, we decided to use the popular docuseries Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness to explore the legal and ethical environments of business with our undergraduate students. We deliberately chose this surprise-hit TV show in order to make our online course as relevant, timely, and engaging as possible. The remainder of the paper will describe the contents of each module of the course, explore their relation to Tiger King, and explain the logic of our design choices.