… is from page 124 of the first volume (“Rules and Order,” 1973) of F.A. Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty (footnotes omitted; original emphasis):
While in political theory the making of law has traditionally been represented as the chief function of legislative bodies, their origin and main concern had little to do with the law in the narrow sense…. This is especially true of the Mother of Parliaments: the English legislature arose in a country where longer than elsewhere the rules of just conduct, the common law, were supposed to exist independently of political authority. As late as the seventeenth century, it could still be questioned whether parliament could make law inconsistent with the common law. The chief concern of what we call legislatures has always been the control and regulation of government….
