I'm reading the Count of Monte Cristo right now, and after looking a little into it dueling seems to be just straight up murder on the grounds of "honor".
Were there laws that allowed the killing of someone through the medium of a duel? If so what were the legal foundations of them?
Were there laws that allowed the killing of someone through the medium of a duel? If so what were the legal foundations of them?
No. Duels were illegal in most places. I would point you to this previous answer I wrote for a longer look at it, but the TLDR is that the law was often willing to turn a blind eye, or let a duelist get away with a slap on the wrist as long as it was conducted properly.
Long story short: European/American dueling was not legal, though up until strict dueling laws were enforced, they often went unpunished.
In common law England, long before American settlement, surviving duelists were often charged with assault, the duel itself was considered incitement, and if there was one survivor, he may have been charged with murder or manslaughter. However, during the precolonial/start of the colonial age, these laws were not enforced. Many jurists, and sometimes even judges without jury backing (we will go with england's common law model since it was implemented in America) were unwilling to convict the duelists because of its wide spread supra-legal acceptance of the practice.
Though never legal in America, or even British America, the art of dueling came with the colonial settlement despite the calm nature of community settlement. For instance:
The more settled nature of colonial life, and the more regular contacts between the colonies and England, led a few Americans to ape the practices of the British aristocracy, including dueling. In Boston, socially prominent young men fought duels in 1718 and 1728. In response, Massachusetts' House of *1815 Delegates passed statutes setting harsher punishments for duelists.The 1718 statute provided that, even in a duel in which no one was injured, the duelists were still liable for a £100 fine and six months' imprisonment.
C. A. Harwell, The End of the Affair? Anti-Dueling LAws and Social Norms in the Antebellum America, 54 Vand. L. Rev. 1805, 1815 (2001)
This even continued into the American Revolution; however, while the support for its existence pursued, the death of Alexander Hamilton spurred the social opposition in the North. This also later followed in the South, but a little later.
I would check out the above listed source . It is one of the better law review articles I have read on the topic.