Ralin wrote:Really? How hard could it be to set up a standard where you have to get a notarized statement signed by both parties to the effect of "We are going to duel and hereby absolve the other of any legal responsibility if we should die in the process of [insert agreed upon parameters]"?U.P. Cinnabar wrote: Not even then. The potential use of such a legality as a "get out of jail free" card is just too much for the law to even be on the books. We've already seen the various stand your ground laws abused in just this fashion.
Meet La Maupin.
She would kill you in a duel. She would dress like a man to do it if necessary.
She would kill anyone (unless we have some champion fencers/HEMA practitioners I don't know about, anyway) on this board in a duel, pretty much ten times out of ten. She once killed three noblemen in duels in one night.
She also took money to challenge people to duels in which they had no hope of beating her. If duelling were legal today, she'd happily take Trump's money, go to appropriate social events, or simply ambush them on the street and provoke Obama, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush, whoever you want to name, into a duel with her, and they would die. She was something called a Professional Duellist, which was basically a type of assassin, because professional duelists tended to be dedicated professionals, while ordinary people who happened to do a bit of fencing could not compete with that.
Another trick of professional duellists was to force people to pay to get out of duels once they'd issued a challenge, and realized what they were up against, as usually an apology (and monetary recompense!) could be issued until the actual moment of the duel; so a professional would hook someone into a duel and then arrange for their second to let them know that they were up against certain death.
It didn't always work: One of Napoleon's Marshals, Augereau, in his younger days, once outwitted a professional duellist who was insulting him in a cafe, who had approached him and was insulting his comrades (he was at this point a sergeant) and his regiment to provoke him by remaining calm, waiting for the man to get done with his insults, ignoring them and then reaching over, unlacing his trousers, and pouring scalding coffee onto his private parts, resulting in the duellist challenging him, letting Sgt. Augreau select weapons of his choosing. Naturally he then won.
But Augreau himself was a professional and very talented soldier. Civilians didn't do well against professional duellists.
