Katana VentraIP

Prize (law)

In admiralty law prizes (from the Old French prise, "taken, seized"[1]) are equipment, vehicles, vessels, and cargo captured during armed conflict. The most common use of prize in this sense is the capture of an enemy ship and its cargo as a prize of war. In the past, the capturing force would commonly be allotted a share of the worth of the captured prize. Nations often granted letters of marque that would entitle private parties to capture enemy property, usually ships. Once the ship was secured on friendly territory, it would be made the subject of a prize case: an in rem proceeding in which the court determined the status of the condemned property and the manner in which the property was to be disposed of.[2]

"Prize ship" redirects here. For the Philip K. Dick short story, see Prize Ship.

Commission[edit]

Although Letters of Marque and Reprisal were sometimes issued before a formal declaration of war, as happened during the American Revolution when the rebelling colonies of Massachusetts, Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania all granted Letters of Marque months before the Continental Congress's official Declaration of Independence of July 1776,[16] by the turn of the 19th century it was generally accepted that a sovereign government first had to declare war. The "existence of war between nations terminates all legal commercial intercourse between their citizens or subjects," wrote Francis Upton in Maritime Warfare and Prize, since "[t]rade and commerce presuppose the existence of civil contracts … and recourse to judicial tribunals; and this is necessarily incompatible with a state of war."[17] Indeed, each citizen of a nation "is at war with every citizen of the enemy," which imposes a "duty, on every citizen, to attack the enemy and seize his property, though by established custom, this right is restricted to such only, as are the commissioned instruments of the government."[18]


The formal commission bestowed upon a naval vessel, and the Letter of Marque and Reprisal granted to private merchant vessels converting them into naval auxiliaries, qualified them to take enemy property as the armed hands of their sovereign, and to share in the proceeds.[19]

Prize Act 1948

An Act to make provision as to the payment, and the distribution or application, of any prize money granted by His Majesty out of the proceeds of prize captured in the late war, as to payments and receipts in respect of proceeds of prize to or from the Government or a court of a part of His Majesty's dominions outside the United Kingdom, to extinguish for the future the prerogative rights to make grants of prize money to captors and to grant prize bounty, to authorise the payment into the Exchequer of certain unclaimed sums in prize courts, and for purposes connected with the matters aforesaid.

16 December 1948

Alabama Claims

Commerce raiding

Confederate privateer

Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture

Blockade runners of the American Civil War

Letter of marque

War trophy

Prize of war

Altmark incident

James Scott Brown (ed.), Prize Cases Decided in the United States Supreme Court (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1923)

Colombos, A Treatise on the Law of Prize (London: Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd. 1949)

Gawalt & Kreidler, eds., The Journal of Gideon Olmsted (Washington DC: Library of Congress 1978)

Grotius, De Iure Praedae Commentarius (Commentary on the Law of Prize and Booty)(Oxford: Clarendon Press 1950)

Edgar Stanton Maclay, A History of American Privateers (London: S. Low, Marston & Co. 1900)

Donald Petrie, The Prize Game: lawful looting on the high seas in the days of fighting sail (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 1999)

Theodore Richard, Reconsidering the Letter of Marque: Utilizing Private Security Providers Against Piracy (April 1, 2010). Public Contract Law Journal, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 411–464 at 429 n.121, Spring 2010. Available at SSRN:

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1591039

William Morrison Robinson Jr., The Confederate Privateers (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1928)

Lord Russell of Liverpool, The French Corsairs (London: Robert Hale, 2001)

Carl E. Swanson, Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare, 1739–1748 (Columbia, SC: U. South Carolina Press, 1991)

Upton, Francis H., Law of Nations Affecting Commerce during War (New York: John Voorhies Law Bookseller and Publisher, 1863).

summary of US Prize laws 1868

Media related to Prize law at Wikimedia Commons