ABSTRACT
"The Path of the Law" was an address that Oliver Wendell Holmes was invited to deliver at Boston University, and essentially summed up his jurisprudential philosophy. It was in some respects a development of many of the themes that Holmes had touched on in his address a decade earlier at Harvard when he had discussed his own early training in the law. Holmes tried to show that within the quotidian grind of legal practice something truly noble could be gleaned. At the same time Holmes emphasized that the law was no mystery, nor was it in any sense morally driven or derived, but was simply a profession with principles similar to those of science. The law was, as Holmes argued, essentially about prediction, hence his emphasis on how the bad man might approach the matter: simply with a view to predicting what the courts would most likely do in any given situation.
