Part II - The Inner Path of the Common Law

Summary

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.”