suggesting that the best reading "would make Gregory urban
praetor,
A
praetor, the most superior of the magistrates, served the early Republic as consul.
This woman, unique to the Lucan Gospel, exhibited the same tenacity that Plutarch described in his "Life of Sertorius." This great Roman soldier served as
praetor in Spain in the first century B.C.
After the Enterprise is diverted to the Romulan planet of Romulus, supposedly because they want to negotiate a truce, the Federation soon finds out that the Romulans are planning an attack on Earth, while Captain Jean-Luc Picard faces off against the new Romulan
praetor, a clone of himself.
(10) Later, the
praetor (a special Roman magistrate whose job was, in part, to mitigate the harshness of the ius civile) would intervene, at least in extreme cases, such as when acts were compelled by duress.
But he is most explicit in his fascination with the idea of Roman "reception of an international custom of commercial law." (97) For Goldman, the
praetor peregrinus (who for some of Goldman's contemporaries provided an early model of the judge applying lois de police (98)) is "this representative of Roman authority" who "doubtless borrowed from the customs of international commerce and from the less formalistic elements of the Roman law itself." (99) In fact, despite Goldman's assurance, there is little historical evidence--but a lot of speculation--as to what ius gentium really was.
Leaving aside the details, for instance the Roman division of labour between the
praetor and the appointed judges, or the medieval division of labour between the "decision-makers" and the "judge" proclaiming the sentence, we have--to plagiarize Max Weber--an ideal-type course of events from the family or the clan to the state, from vengeance and self-help to distanced and neutral proceedings, from speech to writing, from a religiously or magically defined moral law to the differentiation of a system "law", from a ruling uno actu in situ to multi-level proceedings with the option to appellate, in other words: to the formation of normative hierarchies.