… is Bruce Benson (on page 281 of his 1990 volume, The Enterprise of Law) quoting the great legal scholar and philosopher Lon Fuller (from page 174 of the 1981 collection of some of Fuller’s essays, The Principles of Social Order) (footnote deleted; ellipses original to Benson):
As Fuller noted, “it is clear that property and contract were … functioning social institutions before state-made laws existed or were even conceived of.”
