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.

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.