Archie de Schutter

During my first month with my therapist, I was given this worksheet to read and work on. She noticed that while I was talking with her, that my thoughts followed a lot of these. I wasn’t aware that my anxiety had brought me down paths of low self-worth and stinky thinking.  After a couple of weeks of talking with her, she gave me this worksheet to work on. 

if you call someone to witness and they refused to show up, you are legally entitled to stand outside their house and scream, but only every third day

you can sell your son into slavery once or twice, but after the third time he doesn’t have to put up with that shit anymore

no wailing allowed at funerals

also you can only have ONE funeral per person, don’t get greedy

if your neighbor’s tree has a branch hanging into your yard, you can legally cut down the entire fucking tree

however, if some of your neighbor’s fruit from his dumb tree falls into your yard, he can legally come into your yard to snoop around get it

they are indeed real! they’re from the twelve tables, a roman law text so old that it’s hard for even people who are well-versed in latin to read by the text is archaic (also half of it is missing but whatever)

while we’re on the subject, here are some more good ones that i forgot to put in:

the penalty for writing a song slandering someone (it’s very specific on the song bit) is getting clubbed to death

if you hurt someone (or if you just sort of inconvenience them) through magic arts, the penalty for that is also death

however if you maim someone’s limb through normal limb-maiming processes you just sort of have to figure things out between yourselves

if there’s a road right next to your property, feel free to build a fence around it to prevent people from driving into it, but if you don’t build your own fence then tough shit

if you waste all your money you can legally be prevented from wasting even more of your money

- when you sign a contract, it’s something so important that you need witnesses. So you bring a couple of kids along with you, do the transaction and pull their ear so that they won’t forget it either, and can be called in front of a court to testify. That’s called the antestatio.

This was considered so efficient that this tradition was carried over into subsequent medieval legal systems in Europe well after the fall the Roman empire.