I do totally agree with Haukur, but obviously Latin "legere" (lego, legis,
lexi, lectum, legere) had a wider range of meanings other than "to pick up".
The first and the most important one is, as everybody knows (I think), "to
read", which comes from the evolution of an indefinite concept meaning "to
collect", rather than "to pick up"; thus "to read" was originally thought as a
collecting process, in the sense of putting alphabet letters together and order
them in groups (Latin, as many ancient languages, used the so-called "scriptio
continua", that means no spaces to distinguish a word from the following or the
previous). So, Latin "leges" indicated only written laws (exhibited in the
forum), while spoken laws were referred to as "mores" (nom. mos). Ancient Greek
used the same verb "lego, lèghein" to say also "to speak", to mean a precisely
ordered discourse.
This has not been said, but presumely English "law" and its Scandinavian
cognates is related to the German verb "liegen" (to lie down, and also to be
located). Is it right?