an oath” (_solvere aut jurare cogam_); before the question of right is decided, “I forbid force to be used” (_vim fieri veto_). A consideration of judge-made law, the consequence it may be of precedents drawn from already decided cases, and therefore merely the recognition of practice which had already crept into use,[938] but still expressed, as it is in this case, in a purely abstract form, suggests many questions. First, as to its validity. The edict was law that held good for a year (_lex annua_):[939] a limitation that would have produced a most unsatisfactory uncertainty as to its validity for future litigants and subsequent magistrates, had it not been for the facts that it was actually continuous, and that it was received, only to be slightly modified in accordance with legislative changes or with the demands of convenience, by successive wielders of civil jurisdiction. To use technical language, the edict was _perpetuum et tralaticium_.[940] Secondly, we must consider the limitation on the magistrate and the forces that bound him to observe his own promulgated law. At Rome the veto operated successfully for this purpose[941] even before the passing of the _lex Cornelia_ of 67 B.C., which obliged a magistrate to adhere to the rulings of his own edict.[942] In the shaping of the edictal rules the mere fact of publicity in a community so legally gifted as that of the Romans must have sufficed to keep the magistrate within the bounds of prudence; when he was conscious of little legal training, the assistance of eminent jurisconsults must have frequently been called in. The edict is the source of most of our modern Roman law; the titles of Justinian’s _Digest_ are often commentaries on its rubrics excerpted from the writings of the scientific jurists, and that it should become the prototype of the world’s law was only natural when we consider the way in which it was built up. It was not only the collective work of generations of gifted men, who were fortunately not professing lawyers, but it was the outcome of an adjustment of Roman law first with that of Italy and then with that of the provinces. The beginnings of a recognition of a “law of the civilised world” (_jus gentium_) must be older than the institution of the _praetor peregrinus_, since for more than a century the _praetor urbanus_ had been issuing edicts not merely for _cives_ but also for _peregrini_; but, when a separate comprehensive edict was issued for _peregrini_, equity found a more systematic expression, and its reaction on the comparatively rigid forms of the urban edicts was necessarily great; but the power of this reaction was possibly even surpassed by that of the provincial edict (_edictum provinciale_), issued originally by the foreign praetors and then by the proconsuls and propraetors in each of Rome’s dependencies.