W. Waweru is a Jadetimes News Reporter Covering Entertainment News
Image Source: Republic Records
Ariana Grande has finally released her new album, Petal, on July 31, 2026, via Republic Records. The 12-track album took her in another dark direction, combining melodic pop and alternative R&B musical influences while showcasing her creative songwriting and vulnerability. It shows growth and maturity beyond her years.
Grande wrote her lyrics independently throughout this album, while co-writing musically and co-producing with Max Martin and Ilya.
W. Waweru is a Jadetimes News Reporter Covering Entertainment News
Image Source: John Nacion/Getty Images
Tyla released her Sophomore Album, A*POP, on July 24, 2026, via Epic Records.
According toThe Source, “Tyla explained that the album showcases the diversity of her musical influences and upbringing, saying she wants listeners to experience every side of her artistry.”
Tyla stated in an interview on the Ebro Show about the inspiration for the creative process with A*POP. She explained that her project reflects her pop music style, combining her African heritage, synonymous with African Pop.
“‘A*POP’s African Pop. A*POP is literally me trying to extend the idea of what an African pop star looks like and what an African pop star sounds like,” said Tyla.
In 2015, a Staten Island lawyer facing a lawsuit did something almost nobody tries anymore: he formally asked a New York court to let him settle the case with a duel to the death.
A Modern Lawyer Invokes an Ancient Right
Richard Luthmann had been sued by former clients who accused him of helping someone hide assets from creditors. Rather than simply defend himself the ordinary way, Luthmann filed a lengthy legal brief demanding the right to trial by combat — literally, a fight between the parties, or their chosen champions, to decide who wins. His argument wasn't entirely a joke: English common law, which included the right to trial by battle, was in force in the American colonies when New York was founded, and neither New York's legislature nor the US Constitution had ever specifically abolished it.
In March 2016, a state Supreme Court justice actually agreed with him sort of. Justice Philip Minardo ruled that while he wouldn't order a duel in this particular case, Luthmann was technically correct that trial by combat remained, in theory, an available legal option in New York. The case settled the ordinary way. But the loophole, once acknowledged out loud by an actual judge, hasn't gone away since.
Where the Loophole Comes From
To understand why this argument has any legs at all, you have to go back two centuries, to an English murder case that ended the practice in the country where it originated. In 1817, Abraham Thornton was tried and acquitted for the murder of Mary Ashford. Under an old legal mechanism separate from ordinary criminal trials, the victim's brother William Ashford launched a private appeal demanding a retrial. Thornton, invoking a right so old that Parliament had simply never gotten around to abolishing it, claimed trial by battle. England's highest criminal court agreed he was entitled to it. Ashford, unwilling to risk his life fighting a grown man for the outcome, declined the duel, and Thornton walked free.
The public reaction was immediate outrage, not at the murder verdict, but at the discovery that a medieval duel could still override a modern courtroom. Parliament abolished both the private appeal process and trial by battle itself within about a year, permanently closing the loophole in England.
Here's the catch: the American colonies, and later the states, had inherited English common law as it stood at the moment of independence in 1776, more than four decades before England finally abolished trial by combat. Unless a state specifically repealed the practice afterward, the argument goes, it may technically still be sitting on the books, an artifact of a legal system that moved on without ever properly cleaning up after itself.
It Keeps Coming Back
Luthmann's stunt might have stayed a one-off legal curiosity, except it didn't. In 2020, an Iowa man locked in a custody and property dispute asked a court for twelve weeks to acquire practice swords so he could challenge his ex-wife's attorney to combat. The judge declined to entertain it and ordered a psychological evaluation instead. Each time this happens, the same pattern repeats: a judge acknowledges, at least in passing, that no statute explicitly forbids it, then finds an entirely separate reason to say no anyway.
That separate reason is really the answer to why this loophole will never actually produce a duel. The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee due process, meaning the government can't take away someone's life, liberty, or property without fair legal procedure. Deciding a modern civil or custody dispute through armed combat is about as far from that guarantee as a legal system can get, regardless of what common law said in 1776. Courts don't need to formally repeal trial by combat to refuse to use it; they can simply rule that ordering one would violate a constitutional protection that didn't exist when the old rule was written.
A Loophole That's More Interesting Than Useful
Nobody has ever actually fought a court-ordered duel in modern America, and nobody ever will. What makes trial by combat worth knowing about isn't that it works, but what it reveals about how legal systems actually age: they're built in layers, and old rules don't vanish just because everyone assumes they have. Sometimes they just sit there, technically true, waiting for the next person bold, or foolish, enough to point at them.
