You’re approaching this all wrong. Turn up in plate mail and beat the living shit out of him while he flails uselessly against your armour. He’ll soon learn that katanas are not magical elf swords that cut through everything.
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Slight nit to pick: Pierson v. Lane did not specifically say that trial by combat is not part of Iowa law (hardly surprising since it was a case about whether Iowa law recognised a fee simple conditional as an estate and if it did whether the holder of the land could leave it to someone in their will or not).
[Spoiler Alert:]
It did and they could. 
And if you have no idea what a fee simple conditional is - be very grateful.
It confirmed the position that states could pick and choose which bits of the common law they wanted to adopt.
As far as I can tell no significant US court has ever definitively ruled on whether trial by combat was adopted in any state or not.
Which is why certain kinds of people keep bringing it up.
Oddly enough judges don’t seem terribly keen to tell people they can’t hit each other with pointed sticks or that they can (whichever you decide, it’s bound to be appealed, will be horribly messy and a complete PITA) so instead they do as the judge in this case appears to have done - dispose of it administratively.
In this case by pointing out that there aren’t actually any substantive court proceedings underway in which to make the application. And of course, once proceedings are underway it is far easier to say that there is a statutory regime laid down for resolving such claims and therefore even if there were a common law right to trial by combat in general, it is superceded by the statutory process.
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The opposite of love is indifference – not hate, not anger, not any emotion. The heartbroken want anything but indifference.
This “trial by combat” business keeps the guy thinking about her, keeps himself in the spotlight – keeps the indifference in check. For a time.
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Phoenix Jones, Midnight Jack, Red Falcon, Bishop and Westlake Drake are on a routine patrol of the University District
Who are these people? The Seattle League of Justice?
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AFAIK at the time of US independence, the only remaining situation where trial by combat was allowed in English law was the “appeal of murder”. If someone was charged with murder and acquitted, the victim’s family could appeal and mount a second prosecution- but in this second prosecution, unless the evidence was particularly strong, the accused had the right to trial by battle.
This existed in colonial law until independence. Parliament considered abolishing it in Massachusetts Bay Colony as part of the Administration of Justice Act 1774 (one of the “Intolerable Acts”) but in the end decided not to.
Of course, I imagine such an appeal would be banned by the US Constitution’s protection from double jeopardy - it was considered a second trial not a continuation of the original one.
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Good guess - close! They call it the “Rain City Superhero Movement”
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I just remembered an important fact: traditionally, when one challenges another to a duel it is the challenged party that sets the protocol of the trial.
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If I was accused of murder, then acquitted, and then the family tried to continue harassing me, I’ll have to admit I’d be tempted to waive that right
I do iaido, and would definitely not want to get hit by an iaito. Yeah, the iaito would get damaged, but probably not as much as my squishy flesh and weaker than metal bones.
It would be funny if people accepted these goofball’s challenges, and hired real sword experts as their champions. I really suspect that most of the guys (making an assumptions that the duel proponents are male…) trying to duel have not dedicated significant amounts of time to training with the sword…
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They haven’t studied the blade?
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Me too! Greetings to a fellow iaidoka. I definitely wouldnt want to get hit by an iaito. But I have seen one snap under a moderate impact. I’m not sure it would do much bone damage but impacting the right fleshy bits would be ugly… Also a snapped iaito is still a effective metal bludgeon with sharp bits… Compared to a well tempered bit of sharp steel though…
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From the entertaining and informative The System of the World by Neal Stephenson (2004):
The gallows would not be put to use today, save as a landmark by which the two gentlemen from the Tower, and the two seafarers, could find each other. For Tower Hill was a considerable expanse, mostly open parade-ground, but complicated here and there by earth-works where the Tower’s garrison might conduct rehearsals for Continental siege-wars. It would not be suitable for the duellists to blunder about trying to find each other until daylight had washed broad over the land, and so they had agreed to meet at the scaffold where sometimes the Tower’s lordly inmates were put to death. The Yeomen who had conducted the two gentlemen out the Bulwark’s gates peeled away as soon as the timbers of the scaffold came in view, and kept their distance. The legalities were interesting. There was nothing unusual about a noble prisoner strolling about the Liberty of the Tower, of which Tower Hill was a part. Nor for such a prisoner to be shadowed, on his perambulations, by Yeomen of the Guard, to make sure he would not escape or engage in treasonable discourse with free men. But duelling, though a frequent enough practice, was illegal. And so it could be inferred that Charles White had arrived, in advance, with some understanding with the Lieutenant of the Tower. He would go for an early-morning stroll on Tower Hill. At some point the Yeomen might lose him, for a few minutes, in the fog. A pistol-shot or two might be heard. White would be found dead or alive. If dead, he’d be buried. If alive, he’d go back to his lodging in the Tower. Either way the incident would be explained: the strollers had run afoul of footpads; there’d been a struggle; White had wrested a pistol from one of the attackers; et cetera . It was threadbare, but no more so than any of the other fictions that were routinely put forth to explain duels. Accordingly the Yeomen kept their distance, so as to sustain the lies that they would have to tell in an hour’s time; but the dragoons spread out to surround the area, lest White try to flee into the streets of London, only a hundred running paces distant.
“Where are the pistols?” White demanded.
If his opponent, and his opponent’s second, had been gentlemen, he might have greeted them first. But these were Vagabonds of the sea and so that was how he said hello.
“Pistols? What pistols?” asked Dappa.
“You stated in your letter that you would supply a matched set of pistols,” White said, suspecting tomfoolery.
“Firearms are what I said I would supply,” said Dappa, “and I said I’d let you choose. If you will now follow me and Captain van Hoek, please, I’ll show you the first of ’em.” And Dappa strode into the fog. Van Hoek stepped out of the way to let White and his second—a young gent name of Woodruff—follow. They were leery of being followed by van Hoek and so after an awkward few seconds’ feinting and after-youing, they all fell into step abreast of one another and out of mutual stabbing-range.
“Where is it?” Charles White demanded.
“Less than a hundred paces from here,” Dappa returned.
The ground reared up under their feet. They had come to the base of a brief but stiff rise in the Hill, which traditionally was employed as a natural viewing-stand for Londoners eager to see Lords being hanged. Rather than attempting to scale this slope, Dappa deflected to the right and walked along its base, following fresh wheel-ruts that scarred the ground.
He led them to an artillery-piece, mounted on a two-wheeled carriage, and turned round so that the earth rose up behind it. Directions were not easy to keep track of in this dim light, but it seemed to be aimed generally toward the bank of the river. Resting on the ground beside the piece were a powder-keg, a pyramidal stack of five balls, and relevant tools, viz. scoop, ramrod, &c.
Before White could fully take this in, Dappa had made an about-face and begun goose-stepping toward the Thames, counting paces: “One, two, three…”
They were approaching the base of another rise in the ground: this one part of the earthen rampart that surrounded the Bulwark. The sky had brightened, and the fog dissolved, to the point where they could see that he was leading them toward another field-piece, arrayed in the same manner as, and aimed back towards, the first; which loomed down on them from its shelf halfway up Tower Hill.
The hundred paces had given White time to grow accustomed to the idea—even to see humor in it. “Where did you get these guns?” he wanted to know.
“It is a passably entertaining story,” Dappa answered, “but if you are about to die, there’s no point in
relating it to you. And if I am, then one of the ways I mean to spite you is by leaving you in the dark …"
Update: spelling, format.
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Miyamoto Musashi fought at least three duels against samurai, (he was a Ronin) using bokken, and killed two of them, one with a head strike, the other he amazingly cut the man’s throat! Remarkable man, if I had to have someone fight a hand-to-hand combat on my behalf he’s the man!
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