Finding Legal Education’s Lost Empire, Or How I Discovered the Correspondence Law Schools
I always wanted to be an archaeologist. That career path was not to be, however, so I turned to the law, and after an exhilarating academic journey that took a boy from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Oxford University and eventually the Harvard Law School on scholarships I settled down and started teaching legal history at the University of Pittsburgh.
For some two decades I led a reasonably satisfying scholarly life, teaching classes and writing articles and occasionally experimenting with academic applications of new technology, which interested me from an historical as well as a practical perspective. But I was restless and a little bit bored and I needed a new perspective on my own field, so in 2010 I decided to shift from teaching my students about the history of law to teaching them about the history of lawyers — how they worked, how they thought, how they were educated, and how they had shaped American life. The ostensibly minor pedagogical shift completely changed my intellectual agenda, as it quickly led me to discover that the history of actual lawyering was ridiculously understudied and unappreciated.
And that’s when I saw it. The footnote, that is. I was still getting a grip on the basic outline of changes in the orientation of the American legal profession in the late 19th century when I read an annotation in Lawrence Friedman’s classic History of American Law that mentioned in an almost offhand way that law in the United States had once been taught by mail, and that something called the Sprague Correspondence School of Law in Detroit had claimed to enroll over a thousand students in 1893. That was all.
I was intrigued. I wondered how a school so large had virtually disappeared from American lawyers’ collective memory. Certainly in my own very broad legal education I had never heard any of my professors mention correspondence instruction. Yes, they had mentioned the so-called “night schools” that had arisen in the late nineteenth century and had become numerous across the country before being effectively corraled by the elite bar in the 1920s as it tried to limit who could practice law in an age of great demographic upheaval in the United States. But nobody had said you could learn law by mail. Who did that? What kind of operations were these, and when and why had they developed? Was the Detroit institute some kind of one-off, a weird for-profit platypus of sorts that lumbered across the legal landscape for a time until it sank, unregretted, into the mire of memory? And who was the mysterious “Sprague”?
In the old days when I was a law student, pursuing these questions might have taken some time, but in an Internet age I had instant recourse to Google, and so I used it. Searching for “correspondence law schools”, what appeared within seconds were not so much scholarly books and papers on the subject (there were virtually none of those!), but copies of advertisements from late nineteenth century and early twentieth century magazines scanned into Google Books for a range of institutions that promised to teach students law by mail and potentially prepare then for the bar. Some of the ads were tiny, mixed in with dubious come-ons for medical remedies and mail-order shopping, but some — including some for the Sprague School — were beautiful full-page displays obviously prepared by professionals. Many of the correspondence schools, though not Sprague’s, turned out to be based in Chicago, and from virtual pages of once-ubiquitous periodicals they still solicited me to send in for catalogs and materials so I could learn law and become a lawyer.
Of course it was too late to take the long-past pitchmen up on their offers, but looking around in other directions, and especially on eBay, the Internet’s own bazaar, I began to come across the paper trails that the schools had left behind — textbooks, course outlines, sample examinations and corporate prospectuses —that for most people had become quaint curiosities to be auctioned online to collectors of ephemera but which now, for me, were tiny pieces of a complex puzzle that I was putting together for the very first time. Quickly over the initial weeks and months of research, then more slowly over the next few years, the correspondence law schools emerged from the historical darkness, taking shape together with their students and their leaders, some of whom — like William Sprague, the Ohio lawyer-turned-printer who became a pedagogical pioneer when he founded the first for-profit correspondence law school in 1890 — I got to know as real personalities as I read their surviving writings and was able to explore some of the records they had left behind. The largest individual schools became piles on my law school office floor, taking physical form for the first time since most of them went out of business.
Despite what many today might expect, most of the correspondence law schools were not “fly by night” operations built by fraudsters and favored by fools. In fact most of them — and virtually all of the major ones — were significant enterprises created by thoughtful and even visionary lawyer entrepreneurs who sincerely believed in the civic importance of making legal education available to all comers, a goal not espoused by most law professors even today. They operated not out of back alleys, but out of corporate office buildings in major cities. Several commanded multi-million dollar budgets. And far from being childish or amateurish, their teaching materials were mostly thorough and practical; leafing through what were sometimes multi-volume texts, I found they compared favorably to materials produced by today’s bar review companies that help prepare modern law school graduates for modern state bar exams.
But the correspondence law schools themselves were all but gone. A couple (including Sprague’s old school) turned out to have survived under other names as purveyors of paralegal or other reduced forms of legal instruction, but the rest — by my count, over 50 that had appeared and operated for a significant period of time between 1890 and the mid-1920s — had disappeared after some of the more ambitious ones had overreached and drawn the ire of university law professors and elite lawyers who conspired to put them out of business. Yet in a sense the schools were still there, lurking in the historical mist if someone wanted to find them. It was as if the archaeologist I always wanted to be had stumbled across the ruins of a lost empire of correspondence legal education hidden deep within some Central American jungle, overgrown and invisible to most passing travelers but yet waiting patiently to be revealed.
I knew I had to dig. I knew I had to bring to light these schools and the stories of the ordinary men and women who built them, who promoted them, and who enrolled in them for decades, from all regions and races. So now I’m writing a book on the history of the correspondence law schools for the University of Chicago Press, and I’m preparing academic papers on aspects of that history that may not get extended treatment in the book. Drafts of the latter may end up here as I proceed.
This blog is another part of the general exercise of recovery, certainly intended to develop public and academic interest in the correspondence law schools and my work, but also to highlight specific characters, items, institutions and events that I’ve encountered in my explorations. It is, I suppose, a collection of my “excavation notes”, and the records and images I hope to post here and on an associated Twitter feed are some of the excavated “artifacts” that might otherwise never appear or be reproduced in more traditional publication formats, but which nonetheless deserve to see the light of day for the benefit of fellow scholars and other readers. I will also write occasional reflections on my work and what it means, as I use this blog as a virtual mirror to help me better understand what I’m doing.
If you like what you see here and find it interesting, I hope you’ll follow me and become part of this enterprise by offering your own thoughts, your questions, and perhaps even your own family memories of correspondence legal education in the comments to this blog. As law schools across the United States and around the world struggle to provide distance education in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s especially worthwhile to appreciate that we have been here before — that over a century ago, bright law teachers deployed the available technology of their time to teach young men and women separated from their instructors and from each other how to become lawyers. Clearly in taking our own courses online modern law professors cannot claim to have ”invented the wheel”; to that extent the experience of the correspondence law schools may be not only interesting in its own right, but suggestive and salutory as we shape the pedagogical practices of law’s future.
The lost empire lies before us. Let’s pick up a trowel and start digging!
