Understanding the purely legal point of view – which Holmes ultimately personified as the“bad man” – depends on appreciating the temporal dimensions of existence. Working off James Willard Hurst’s Justice Holmes on Legal History, this part attempts to lay the basis for a three-dimensional view of law. Hurst’s ideas of sequence and context lead to a greater appreciation of law’s horizontal and vertical dimensions, and provide the basis for appreciating its depth and vitality. A three-dimensional view of law brings law to present purpose when tied to what Holmes called the law’s fundamental theorem: the philosophical idea that any possible conduct is either lawful or unlawful. From this starting point it might one day be possible to create a metric of the law, one that would materially expand the law’s capacity to be known.

To complement the static analysis of duty in Part I, Part II looks at the law’s leading query,“what is (the) law?” by focusing on its dynamic elements. Instead of simply mapping the law through categories, Holmes sought to develop a positioning system that took into account law’s flux. Part II expounds the central theses of The Common Law and brings to the fore the leading conceptions Holmes used to develop his notion of external standards – apperception and triangulation. It looks at how Holmes traced the development of liability from its primitive origins in revenge. Holmes sought to visualize the law’s movement through such artistic techniques as linear perspective and the creation of vanishing points. Holmes’s efforts to introduce dimensionality into law led him to emphasize the notion of the“purely legal point of view.”