Controller Constructors in Laravel
<p>I'm a novice developer working on an existing Laravel app.  I'm looking through the project and I don't see any controllers constructed anywhere but the controllers all have constructor functions.</p>

<p>Is this a Laravel thing or am I just missing something?  Is controller instantiation handled in the routes or something?  If so, is it bad practice to call a controller constructor manually?(although I can't think of a case offhand where you would want to do this)</p>