Edict, magistrate's
During the Roman Republican period, the edictum perpetuum of the urban praetor was crucial to the development of civil law (see edict, praetor's). Though the praetor's edict was by far and away the most influential in this respect, several other officers of state, who functioned in the capital, also possessed the ius edicendi: dictators, censors, consuls, aediles, quaestors, tribunes of the plebs, and the pontifex maximus. The edicts of these magistrates (and the pontifex) were issued annually, at the moment when the newly elected officers began their terms, as was the case with the praetors. The intent of these other annual edicta seems to have been to communicate publicly, and in broad terms, the manner in which these individuals would function while in office (cf. Wieacker 1988: 407). 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
government, politics, and law; 
justice; 
legal history
The Lex Irnitana: a New Copy of the Flavian Municipal Law
In the spring of 1981, on a hill called Molino del Postero, in undulating territory 5 km south-west of El Saucejo and 3 km north-east of Algámitas, in the province of Seville, a group of men looking for ancient coins and armed with metal-detectors discovered six bronze tablets and some small fragments of other tablets, containing part of the municipal law of a hitherto unknown town, the Municipium Flavium Irnitanum. Although the name of the town was probably Irni, since ancient place-names in Spain ending with -i are very common, such as Astigi, Ucubi, Tucci, Iptuci etc, a name such as Irnium remains possible.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.