In the classic essay by the brilliant Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., he delivers his interpretation on what the law ought to be versus what the law is and looked at the law through the lens of the "bad man." More specifically the law should be defined as a prediction of how the courts behave. "The Path of the Law" by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. was originally published in the "Harvard Law Review" in 1897. Holmes served on the United States Supreme Court as Associate Justice from 1902 to 1932.