The utilitarian or instrumentalist flavor of "The Path of the Law" also found favor with the realists. The purpose of the law, Holmes insisted, was the deterrence of undesirable social consequences: "I think that the judges themselves have failed adequately to recognize their duty of weighing considerations of social advantage." Before the Civil War, this conception of adjudication as a form of social engineering had been widely shared by American judges, but in the late nineteenth century it had fallen out of favor. One of the aspirations of both Holmes and the realists was to revive it. For example, Holmes posited in his dissent for "Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen" that "common law was not a brooding omnipresence in the sky, but the articulate voice of some sovereign (...) that can be identified," thereby arguing in favor of a pragmatic and more realistic approach to judicial interpretation of common law.