In Louisa May Alcott's Eight Cousins, first published i875, young woman called Rose is being given conventional girl's upbringing by her aunts dark and stuffy old mausoleum of house. Then Uncle Alec becomes Rose's new guardian. He strides into the house, throws open the curtains and windows, and hustles his ward into the outdoors. He throws out her old confining clothes and buys her new ones, changes her diet, and with his vigorous scientific intellect begins helping her to clear her mind of received opinions. With the very first paragraph of The Path of the Law, we know Uncle Alec has arrived and that the old Victorian mansion will never be the same again. What was that older world? Nineteenth-century lawyers liked to speak of law sitting in the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world.' Lawyers had, as they saw it, direct line to God's mind through their knowledge of the principles of legal science, which at their most abstract harmonized with the principles of morals and natural justice, as well as with tradition-derived principles of the common law. It was such knowledge of constitutional and private-law principles that supposedly equipped lawyers to be statesmen and social trustees, who could vindicate the rights of clients and the at large and also steer them the performance of their duties. In The Path of the Law, Holmes, swinging his modernizing broom, seems impatient to sweep away all this piety as so much cobwebs. Law is not a mystery but well known whisk. A profession is just job people will pay others to do whisk. What lawyers are paid for is the business of showing clients how to avoid danger from the state whisk whisk. He is at special pains to demystify the law by de-moralizing it to arrive at what he calls business-like understanding of the matter. If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict . I often doubt whether it would not be gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether. Whisk whisk whisk.