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.”

Many legal scholars over the past 120 years have commented on“The Path of the Law.” Part IV selects from this abundant commentary and profiles thirteen ways of looking at the“bad man.” The opinions vary as to why Holmes introduced him in“The Path of the Law.” Apart from sustaining the thesis that Holmes intended the“bad man” as a projection, this part seeks to show how one might through scholarship create dimensionality in American law. Scholarship becomes a stereoscope to make law 3D. The most well-known commentary and commentators on Holmes and the“bad man” are discussed – ranging from Jerome Frank, Hessel E. Yntema, and Walter Wheeler Cook to Francis E. Lucey, Lon Fuller, Mark DeWolfe Howe, Henry M. Hart, Jr., and Yosal Rogat. It also includes a subsection on the distinctive view of the legal pragmatists (Frederic R. Kellogg, Thomas C. Grey, Catharine Pierce Wells, Susan Haack). The part notes the deficiencies in scholarship and, more important, the repeated instances of scholars not attempting to understand, connect, or differentiate in good faith their scholarship from that of their predecessors or contemporaries.