Laws are human creations, made for, followed by, and enforced by human beings. Yet since ancient times, nature’s authority has been invoked in connection with two apparently very different kinds of laws: the natural laws that allegedly govern all human societies, in contrast to the positive laws that govern particular societies; and the laws of nature that describe the universal, ironclad regularities that hold everywhere and always, in this room right now or in the remotest galaxy a million light years away. In the seventeenth century, both natural laws and laws of nature became indispensable ways of thinking about both nature and society. Echoes of these traditions are still very much with us, whether in the form of claims to universal human rights or in the recent redefinition of the kilogram in terms of natural constants. But what do natural laws and laws of nature have to do with one another, if anything? And what does nature have to do with laws of any kind?
Lorraine Daston (2025) studied this question.