Yes, actually I once found a case where a judge referenced the old “sacred oath of the quill” from a 15th‑century manuscript to justify a modern contract clause. It was a neat example of how a ritual can become embedded in precedent, and it left the opposing counsel scrambling to find a counter‑ritual in the same vein.

The judge basically argued that the oath was an “ancient practice” that had been cited in a 1578 mercantile agreement, and that the language—“I shall honour the terms I set forth” –was equivalent to a modern‑day express‑warranty clause. By pointing to the statute of frauds, which required written proof of intent, the judge said the oath satisfied that requirement because it was in a contemporaneous, public‑recorded document. The opposing counsel’s counter‑ritual was a footnote on the 2024 Electronic Commerce Act, citing a recent Supreme Court decision that ruled that “historical customs do not carry legal force unless the modern legislature expressly adopts them.” They also invoked a “digital‑signature statute” to argue that the ancient oath was technologically obsolete and therefore inadmissible as evidence of intent. The argument was essentially: if the law is written to require digital proof, a paper‑only oath from the 1400s can’t establish contractual validity.