… is from page 218 of Bruno Leoni’s pioneering 1963 essay “Law and Economy in the Making,” as reprinted in the appendix to the 1991 Liberty Fund edition of Leoni’s 1961 volume, Freedom and the Law:
Law, like language, is not a gadget that a man can contrive at will.
People can command, dictate, and legislate; however, people cannot consciously create law any more than people can consciously create human language. Genuine law, like language, evolves; each is the result of human action but not of human design.
