Over a century before COVID-19 forced every law school into distance education, two generations of visionary entrepreneurs, dedicated teachers, ambitious students and a few opportunists built a paper empire of some 50 correspondence law schools centered in the American midwest. Commercial overreach and a concerted extermination campaign led by alarmed law professors and lawyers associated with elite eastern universities eventually marginalized them, but not before they had trained thousands of ordinary men and women for the bar by mail and had planted seeds of legal and social reform that would bear fruit for decades. Join Professor Bernard Hibbitts of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law for posts on these remarkable lost law schools, their starry-eyed champions, their vicious detractors and their determined graduates as he writes a book on the forgotten history of correspondence legal education for the University of Chicago Press. As we grapple today with the promise and perils of learning law remotely, it's worth remembering that we've been here before...