The hypothesis that the first law emerged as customary law—repetitive behaviors spontaneously transformed into oral norms—is false. Legal theory and anthropology, shaped by normativism, project the inevitability of norms onto peoples without writing, presupposing that customs must have functioned as laws. Yet this view proves circular: customs are treated as evidence of laws, and laws are inferred from customs. Several flaws undermine the hypothesis. Legal norms presuppose disobedience, selection of relevant behaviors, and conscious decisions about hierarchy and sanctions—none of which can arise spontaneously from repetition. To claim otherwise is to impose a twentieth-century logic of systemic closure onto societies without writing. The cosmovisions of Mesopotamians, Ancient Greeks, Amerindian peoples, and medieval Europeans show that none regarded customs as binding legal rules.