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1 1 (September 20, 2022)

handle is hein.crs/goveiwd0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Con gressionaI R~fesearch Service Federal Admiralty and Maritime Jurisdiction Part 5: Exclusivity of Federal Jurisdiction September 20, 2022 This Legal Sidebar post is the fifth in a five-part series that discusses the bases and scope of U.S. admiralty and maritime jurisdiction. Last year, a supply-chain bottleneck arose at the nation's ports with as many as 101 container ships waiting for berths at the nation's Los Angeles and Long Beach ports in the weeks before Christmas. These delays added to the time it took to deliver the goods to market and increased the costs of transporting them. Claims for breaches of maritime contracts related to shipping delays may fall within U.S. admiralty and maritime jurisdiction. As a result, Congress may be interested in how this area of law operates. Additional information on this topic can be found at the Constitution Annotated: Analysis and Interpretation of the US Constitution. In Article III of the Constitution, the Framers granted the federal judiciary jurisdiction over admiralty and maritime cases to ensure that courts would apply uniform rules in deciding cases that could affect domestic commerce and might implicate foreign affairs. In the Judiciary Act of 1789, Congress conferred exclusive admiralty jurisdiction on the federal district courts while preserving concurrent state court jurisdiction over common-law remedies so that the states could supplement the administration of federal maritime law. In practice, state courts retain concurrent jurisdiction over most contract and tort cases that fall within federal admiralty jurisdiction because a plaintiff may bring a personal action seeking common-law remedies against an individual defendant in most of these cases. In an in personam case under the common law, liability attaches to property only to the extent of the individual defendant's title in that property. When bringing such maritime actions against defendants, the plaintiff may choose either federal or state court. By contrast, the Supreme Court has held that, as a matter of statute, federal courts have exclusive admiralty jurisdiction over cases in which the plaintiff seeks remedies for maritime torts or contracts that lie against property in rem (e.g., the seizure of a vessel to enforce a maritime lien). For example, the Court held invalid a California court's application of a statute that allowed the state's courts to subject vessels to condemnation and sale in lawsuits brought directly against the vessels for breaches of maritime contracts. The Court determined that the federal courts traditionally had exclusive jurisdiction under the Judiciary Act over such in rem admiralty proceedings. Such actions were not saved by the Judiciary Act's savings clause because they were based on civil (i.e., statutory) law rather than common law. Congressional Research Service https://crsreports.congress.gov LSB10828 CRS Legal Sidebar Prepared for Members and Committees of Congress

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