The opening chapter introduces the main thesis that the book expounds: Holmes articulated in“The Path of the Law” his theory of legal education. His approach to legal education reflected his ideas worked out in scholarship and in practice, on the nature of law and the best ways to advance legal knowledge. The chapter further explains the structure of the book, both as a work of intellectual history and legal theory.

Both Holmes and Langdell recognized the primacy of procedure but differed in how they understood the development of legal doctrine from that common starting point. This part begins by exploring those differences and their implications for legal pedagogy. The rise of the modern law school necessitated the reformulation of law itself. Holmes articulated his basic conception that the legal profession had to refine its sense of the different interests at stake and how they could best be proportioned. From first to last Holmes sought for law (and lawyers) to grow more civilized. He objected to traditional shibboleths regarding the importance of a university education or of using the Roman civil law or morality (such as some version of Natural Law) as a propaedeutic. Holmes had faith in the effort to structure through law a civilization still coming into its own. He also believed law should become its own discipline, building from within the practice a greater comprehension of law’s effects. The part concludes by showing that Holmes’s attempts to unify law as a discipline were ill-fated but the same result could be achieved by viewing law in 3D, that is, stereoscopically.

Using Brian Simpson’s Invitation to Law as an opening, Part I explores that basic idea that law is for lawyers. Law requires study, training, and reflection. Its development cannot rest on intuition alone. The paradigmatic double-sided question for professional growth is,“what is (the) law?” Taking this question as law’s leading query, this part explores the beginnings of Holmes’s jurisprudence and his early efforts to map the common law. It looks closely at Holmes’s understanding of a legal duty and a legal penalty and how he reshaped the Austinian heritage to develop his own notion of a jurisprudential boundary.

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.”

The Conclusion uses Karl N. Llewellyn’s“What Price Contract? – An Essay in Perspective” to bring together many of the dominant themes discussed in the book. For three-dimensional law to arise legal scholars must be more refined in their perception of ideas – civilized growth, in Holmes’s view, depended on that. Holmes’s sensitivity to multivalency becomes then the leading goal of a well-wrought legal pedagogy. The more law could muster feeling, the more civilized the nation would grow. At least that was Holmes’s hope as he expressed it to Harold J. Laski.

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.