Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2025
Abstract
When the ship MV Dali allided with the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Harbor in March 2024, it caused the bridge to collapse. This collapse killed six people, destroyed a major highway in a large city, and closed one of America's busiest ports. Officials must determine who is responsible. Though the formal investigation is still ongoing, officials will likely identify the responsible parties using long-settled rules about the possession, command, and control of vessels engaged in maritime activities. Not all cases are as straight-forward. Around the world, it is getting more difficult to assign legal responsibility for illegal and harmful activities performed on navigable waters. Close to American shores, unqualified charter operators use deceptive charter agreements, such as those falsely purporting to be bareboat charters and complicated forms of ownership, to evade legal responsibility for the safety of their passengers. Further out at sea, hundreds of ocean-going commercial vessels now operate under false signs of authority. Vessel owners and charterers of this so-called "shadow fleet" use complicated corporate structures, deceitful charters, and other devices to evade sanctions imposed on their customers to escape enforcement after causing damage to infrastructure on the seabed, or to avoid responsibility for badly-maintained vessels. Western democracies suspect that nefarious state actors are behind acts of sabotage that ships in the "shadow fleet" perpetrate, but that suspicion can be difficult to verify or prove. Other governments may use ostensibly private vessels in coordination with official vessels and military assets to assert control overseas to which those governments have no lawful claims.
Recommended Citation
Adam J. MacLeod, Vessel Charters in Sea and Space, 50 Tul. Mar. L.J. 1 (2025).
