In 2020, an Iowa man in a custody dispute formally asked a judge for trial by combat with Japanese swords. In 2002, a British mechanic challenged the motor vehicle agency to a sword fight over a 25-pound parking penalty. This episode traces why such requests keep surfacing, going back to the Germanic tribal custom of settling unwitnessed crimes through judicial combat as a circuit breaker against generational blood feuds.

It covers the meticulous rules of the 1230 Sachsenspiegel, the 60-foot judicial lists of Norman Britain, exemptions for women, minors, the elderly and Londoners under Magna Carta, hired champions and prison approvers, and the 1386 Paris duel between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris in which a loss would have meant execution for Carrouges’ wife Marguerite. It then examines Renaissance Italy’s mentita system, the Chekavar proxy duels of Malabar, how lawyers buried the practice in legal fictions, the 1818 Ashford v. Thornton case that forced Parliament to abolish it in 1819, and why it was never formally repealed by name in the United States.

• Why the practice is absent from Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Middle Eastern law
• Where the phrase throwing down the gauntlet comes from
• How letting the defendant choose weapons deterred bullies in Italy
• Why modern judges reject combat requests despite the old statute
• How adversarial courtroom language still echoes the duel