He was educated at Charterhouse School and Christ's College, Cambridge, where in 1766 he graduated Bachelor of Arts with first-class honours in the Mathematical Tripos and was named as second Wrangler.
[2] Law became a Fellow of Christ's and an Anglican clergyman, and spent several years as a tutor and lecturer at Cambridge.
It was later reported that the Duke of Portland, after a long legal battle with Sir James Lowther over estates in Carlisle, was anxious to reward a man who had helped him in that matter with other preferments then held by Law.
In 1797, for instance, Law wrote to Paley: "In your chapter on divine contrivance, you must have an article on the solar system..."[4] On taking up the post in Clonfert, Law hired the mathematician John Howard as his steward, but dispensed with Howard's services in 1786 after "an unfortunate marriage".
He died in Dublin on 18 March 1810 and was buried in the Chapel of Trinity College, where he had founded prizes for mathematics.
[3] Another brother, Thomas Law (1756–1834), was a business man who settled first in British India and then in 1793 in the United States, where he married as his second wife Eliza Parke Custis, a granddaughter of Martha Washington.