…is from page 99 of Roger Koppl’s 2018 book Expert Failure (original emphasis):
Many thinkers (and most undergraduate economics students) seem to believe that any “laws of economics” would have to be first devised and promulgated and then followed. If there is a law, there is a lawgiver. But the “laws” of a spontaneous order generally function even when nobody is aware of them. Thus, an increase in the supply of a commodity causes its price to fall in Homeric Greece no less surely than in nineteenth-century London.
JMM: We can broaden Dr Koppl’s statement to more than just economic laws. Laws, as distinguished from legislation, are followed without necessarily any conscious knowledge of the law. Some laws are universal (such as the increase of supply noted here), and some may be specific to a time and place (such as the orderly fashion a crowd leaves a stadium after a ballgame), but prior direction of the laws are not necessary to their functioning. Indeed, we tend to pick up on the laws not necessarily through formal education, but rather through social cues from our interactions.
The fact that laws are not necessarily known beforehand and explicitly leads to the reason why they need to be discovered (see my post here). Laws are something observed though human action.
A Force for Good 