I share this here primarily because if anyone is going to get the joke, it might be you all.

I'm busily developing a course that I'll never give intended to teach the theory of financial accounting to lawyers. Me being me and all, it went a little off the rails and somehow I am arriving at a byline something like this:

This class examines accounting as an applied heuristic of critical semiotics—an institutionalized method for stabilizing meaning within systems of economic representation. By treating accounting artifacts as structured claims about reality, the class repositions double-entry bookkeeping not as arithmetic but as a semiotic control architecture, designed to preserve correspondence between sign and referent under adversarial scrutiny.

If things go as expected, I’ll end up replacing critical race theory with critical accounting theory as the next great menace to polite society.

Think of it as a matter of applied epistemology within formal constraints (contemporary legal practice) - how to examine and use what passes as "objective truth" where the "numbers speak for themselves" in service of your client's interests. It will apply what I am calling a "critical frame" to the products of accountants (accounting records, reports, and assurances) by way of three questions:

1) What is the context for the creation/presentation of this accounting product?
2) What systems were in place when it was created to provide present confidence in the reliability of the work product contained therein?
3) What evidence is currently available that make it more or less likely that the claims therein have a "factual basis"?

Those questions lead naturally to a pragmatic inquiry into whether what is accounted for—and how—is preserved across shifting evidential frames. In the end, forensic accounting becomes the act of testing the metaphysical pretenses of the accounting product against the evidentiary demands of law.

Maybe if I play my cards right, I'll get invited to speak at a critical theory symposium.