PROFESSOR PRINCE’S TWEET ABOUT JEOPARDY LEGAL ERROR CITED IN LEADING BLOG
December 2020 — On November 27, 2020, Professor Samantha Prince was watching Jeopardy and was excited to see the “Let’s Start a Small Business” category. An incorrect answer by a contestant, which Jeopardy allowed, led to a tweet by Professor Prince, which was thereafter cited by Creighton Law School Dean Joshua Fershee in his Business Law Prof Blog.
Professor Prince was alert and ready to knock out all of the questions when Jeopardy hosted the “Let’s Start a Small Business” category. Professor Prince is an expert in small businesses and teaches courses in Company Creation and Company Operation and serves as faculty advisor for the Penn State Dickinson Law’s Entrepreneurship certificate. One of the points that Professor Prince emphasizes in her Business Entities and Entrepreneurship Law classes is the fact that the proper name of an LLC is Limited Liability Company — not Corporation. Professor Prince was surprised to see Jeopardy get this wrong. The $1000 question in this category was “Per the National Small Business Association more than 30% of U.S. small businesses operate as these LLCs.” The contestant responded by stating “Limited Liability Corporation.” Although this was an incorrect answer, Jeopardy permitted it, with Alex Trebek simply saying “yes, or Companies.”
Jeopardy is not alone in making this mistake. There are many people and even some courts that get it wrong. Dean Joshua Fershee (Creighton) is a leader in the charge to correct the misstated name and has blogged about it numerous times on the Business Law Prof Blog. Here he provides information and presents Professor Prince’s tweet video of the Jeopardy question gone wrong. Dean Fershee stated “I thank Professor Samantha Prince at Penn State Dickinson Law for bringing this to my attention, upsetting as it is.”
Professor Samantha Prince is an Associate Professor of Lawyering Skills and Entrepreneurship at Penn State Dickinson Law. She has a Master of Laws in Taxation from Georgetown University Law Center, and was a partner in a regional law firm where she handled transactional matters that ranged from an initial public offering to regular representation of a publicly-traded company. Most of her clients were small to medium sized businesses and entrepreneurs, including start-ups. An expert in entrepreneurship law, she established the Penn State Dickinson Law entrepreneurship program, is an advisor for the Entrepreneurship Law Certificate that is available to students, and is the founder and moderator of the Inside Entrepreneurship Law blog.