The Arrested Ship: In Rem, the Deodand, and What the Admiralty Claim Gets Right

The footage from the sanctions wave was unforgettable: three-hundred-foot superyachts, their oligarch owners suddenly toxic, being towed into the custody of governments that had no idea what to do with them. And buried in the coverage was a vocabulary that sounded, to anyone who has spent time near heterodox legal conferences, eerily familiar. The vessels were arrested. The arresting agency became responsible for maintaining them. The cases were captioned not against the owners but against the ships themselves.

The instinct that something real sits underneath that vocabulary is correct. There is a genuine, ancient, unimpeachable body of law here — stranger than the folklore that borrows from it. The task of this essay is to isolate what is real, what is borrowed, and exactly where the folklore breaks. The short version: the maritime doctrine is settled law; the structural observation beneath the conference claim is judicially acknowledged; and the conference conclusion — that “the courts are operating in admiralty,” so a defendant can invoke admiralty or the UCC to defeat a sovereign charge — mistakes a borrowed procedure for a jurisdiction it never carried.

1. A ship can be a defendant

Start with the genuine article, because it is more interesting than anything the folklore built on top of it.

In admiralty, a vessel is not merely property attachable to satisfy its owner’s debt. The vessel is itself a juridical person — a defendant. The caption reads Plaintiff v. The Vessel “X,” her engines, tackle, and apparel, or, in the forfeiture variant, United States v. One [vessel]. The owner may never be named. The ship is sued, the ship is liable, the ship is arrested.

This is the operative legal theory, not loose talk. Its leading articulation is Justice Story’s in The Malek Adhel, 43 U.S. (2 How.) 210 (1844). The offending vessel, Story wrote,

“is treated as the offender, as the guilty instrument or thing to which the forfeiture attaches, without any reference whatsoever to the character or conduct of the owner.”

The doctrine was put to its hardest test in The China, 74 U.S. (7 Wall.) 53 (1868), where a ship was held liable in rem for a collision caused by a compulsory pilot — a pilot the owner was legally required to take aboard and over whom he had no practical control. The owner was faultless. The ship paid anyway, because the ship, not the owner, was the defendant.

The stack

The procedural skeleton lives in the Supplemental Rules for Certain Admiralty and Maritime Claims, appended to the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure: Rule B (maritime attachment and garnishment), Rule C (the in rem action — the arrest of the vessel itself), and Rule E (general provisions for custody, security, and release). A claimant files a verified complaint, the clerk issues a warrant of arrest, the U.S. Marshal serves it, and the arresting party moves to appoint a substitute custodian to take physical responsibility for the vessel.

The discipline this site applies to the difference between law, statute, rule, and policy matters acutely here, because the heterodox argument collapses all of them into the single word “admiralty.” The arrest is in fact a stack of four distinct authorities:

Two features of that stack deserve emphasis. First, the substantive lien rests on positive law: Title 46 was enacted as positive law, completed by Pub. L. 109-304 (2006), so the maritime lien is the real thing and not merely prima facie evidence — a genuine contrast with the prima-facie status of Title 26 that so much of the tax material on this site turns on. Second, the procedure is rules — and the Rules Enabling Act provides in terms that such rules “shall not abridge, enlarge or modify any substantive right.” Procedure is the bottom of the stack. Jurisdiction is the top. The conference claim treats the bottom as if it were the top. Hold that thought; it is the whole case.

2. The custodial duty is real — and it bites

The observation that the arresting agent must maintain the ship is correct, and it is one of the most analytically fertile features of the doctrine.

Once arrested, a vessel is in custodia legis — in the custody of the law. That custody is not free. The vessel must be berthed, insured, crewed, fueled, and maintained. Under the local admiralty rules, the arresting party must deposit funds with the Marshal in advance to cover anticipated custodial costs, and the substitute custodian assumes personal responsibility for the vessel. The law then rewards the party bearing that preservation burden with a remarkable priority: when the vessel is sold, custodia legis expenses are reimbursed first — ahead of even preferred ship mortgages — on the equitable logic that the party who preserves the res for the benefit of all claimants is paid before any of them. (Admiralty inverts ordinary lien priority in a way worth noting as a tradition marker: among maritime liens of the same class the rule runs “first in time, last in right,” the reverse of the common-law “first in time, first in right.”)

The Amadea

The Ukraine-war yacht seizures are the cleanest contemporary illustration — with one wrinkle: most of them, the Amadea included, are forfeiture in rem rather than maritime-lien arrest. The custodial mechanics are the same.

The 348-foot Amadea, valued across reporting at somewhere between roughly $230 and $325 million, was seized in Fiji in 2022 on a U.S. warrant and brought to San Diego, where it sat in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service while the civil-forfeiture case was litigated — not in San Diego, but in the Southern District of New York, before Judge Dale Ho. Court filings put the carrying cost on the order of $900,000 a month — roughly $600,000 in crew, fuel, and maintenance, plus six figures more in insurance and periodic dry-docking — totaling around $20 million by early 2024 and roughly $32 million by 2025.

The litigation turned, in part, on that cost. The government argued that the maintenance burden itself was grounds to sell the vessel before trial, writing that it was “excessive” for taxpayers to pay nearly a million dollars a month and that an interlocutory sale would reduce the carrying cost “to zero.” The claimant — Eduard Khudainatov, whom the court would ultimately treat as a “straw owner” for the sanctioned Suleiman Kerimov — played the same structure from the other side, offering to reimburse the maintenance costs in exchange for the vessel’s return.

It is worth being precise about how this came out, because the precise outcome is more instructive than the slogan. The government’s cost-justifies-sale gambit failed in its first form: in July 2024 the district court denied the interlocutory sale, finding the government had not shown the maintenance costs excessive relative to comparable yachts. The forfeiture then succeeded on the merits — a March 2025 order finding a sufficient basis to treat the claimants as mere straw owners with beneficial ownership in the Kerimov family — and the Amadea was ultimately sold at a sealed-bid auction that closed in September 2025.

The point survives the correction, and is in fact sharpened by it. The custodial burden is so real that it reshapes the litigation from both directions: the sovereign reaches for the cost as a reason to liquidate; the claimant offers to assume the cost to recover the res. The ship’s maintenance is not a footnote to the arrest. It is a structural feature with priority status and litigation consequences — and, as §6 argues, a feature that quietly indicts the rest of the enforcement system by its absence there.

3. The taproot: the deodand and two in rem traditions

Here is where the conference material gropes toward something genuine and loses the thread. There are two distinct in rem traditions in American law, and they look identical from outside because both personify the res:

1. Maritime-lien arrest (Rule C): the vessel is the defendant because the lien attaches to the ship, which is the security. This is the private/commercial sphere — repairs, wages, salvage, collision. The ship is “liable” the way collateral is liable.

2. Civil forfeiture: the thing is the defendant because the thing is “guilty.” This is the public/sovereign sphere. Its taproot is the deodand.

The deodand — deo dandum, “to be given to God” — was the English common-law rule by which a chattel that caused a death was forfeited to the Crown as a guilty object, the owner’s innocence beside the point. The institution itself never crossed into American law. The fiction it rests on did, and the Supreme Court has named the lineage in its own words. In Calero-Toledo v. Pearson Yacht Leasing Co., 416 U.S. 663 (1974) — note that it, too, is a yacht case — a pleasure yacht leased to Puerto Rican residents was forfeited after marihuana was found aboard, over the objection of a lessor conceded to be “uninvolved in and unaware of” the wrongful use. The Court traced the history directly —

“At common law the value of an inanimate object directly or indirectly causing the accidental death of a King’s subject was forfeited to the Crown as a deodand.”

— and upheld the forfeiture against the innocent owner, because the proceeding runs against the thing: “the innocence of the owner of property subject to forfeiture has almost uniformly been rejected as a defense.” Half a century earlier, in J. W. Goldsmith, Jr.-Grant Co. v. United States, 254 U.S. 505 (1921), the Court had upheld the forfeiture of an automobile carrying untaxed liquor over the objection of an innocent conditional seller, describing the mechanism as Congress

“ascribing to the property a certain personality, a power of complicity and guilt in the wrong.”

So the Amadea is, doctrinally, a deodand: the complaint is captioned against the vessel; the vessel is the “guilty” thing; the sanctioned owner’s culpability is the predicate, but the defendant is the ship. The 2022 yacht seizures are the Pearson yacht of 1974 wearing a newer hull — the same fiction, the same personified res, the same custodial burden, fifty years on.

The same fiction-machinery runs, in the opposite direction, through United States v. Amy — the 1859 prosecution of an enslaved woman in which Chief Justice Taney had the deodand/forfeiture frame available and deliberately declined it, because using it would have armed the slave’s owner with a compensation claim against the government. That pairing — the deodand the system uses (the yacht) against the deodand it refuses (Amy) — is the cleanest single illustration of the asserting-party inversion, and it is developed in the finding on Taney’s toga civilis passage. The relevant point here is narrower: the personified, “guilty” res is not a fringe invention. It is doctrine the Supreme Court traces by name.

4. The four lenses, briefly

Run through the four-lens framework, the material sorts cleanly.

Positive law. The real arrest doctrine passes: the constitutional grant, the positive-law lien, and the procedural rules are all genuine and traceable. The overextension fails at the first link — “all courts are admiralty courts” has no positive-law basis, because Article III grants admiralty jurisdiction over maritime matters, and admiralty-derived procedure in a forfeiture statute does not import admiralty jurisdiction into a tax or traffic case.

Antinomy. The richest genuine seed. A thing cannot be morally guilty; the law treats it as the offender anyway and forecloses the owner’s innocence. The Court does not hide the contradiction — it names the deodand, acknowledges the force of the innocent-owner objection, and proceeds past it by fiat. That is harmonization-as-patch. And the tension is not frozen: the Calero-Toledo due-process dicta and the later statutory innocent-owner defense show it has moved. A live antinomy, not a dead end.

Public/private. The load-bearing lens. Maritime-lien arrest enforces a security interest in the private/commercial sphere; civil forfeiture is a public/sovereign taking. Both wear identical in rem clothing, and the heterodox argument lives entirely in the blur between them — reimagining a public registration artifact (a birth certificate, an SSN, the all-capitals “strawman”) as a private commercial res that can be “arrested,” bonded, and “discharged” by a UCC filing. The edifice depends on erasing a boundary the doctrine does not let you erase.

Legal tradition. Admiralty is genuinely distinct — Article III names it separately from law and equity; its procedure is its own, down to the inverted lien priority. The conference attendees correctly intuit that something non-common-law is happening when a proceeding runs against a thing and forecloses ordinary defenses. But the intuition is mis-mapped: the admiralty procedural skeleton was borrowed into the forfeiture statutes without the jurisdictional substance. Mistaking procedure-derived-from-admiralty for admiralty jurisdiction is, at once, the tradition-lens error and an impedance mismatch.

5. The routing problem — and the receivable version

That last point is the bridge to this site’s routing-failure diagnosis. Sort the material into the three categories the framework uses:

Real doctrine, not heterodox at all. Maritime-lien arrest, the custodia legis priority, the personification of the vessel. Correct law. The baseline, not a claim to be verdicted.

Category 1 — substantively wrong, no routing fix. The all-capitals name as a “vessel”; the gold-fringe flag as proof of admiralty jurisdiction; “I am not the defendant, that is my strawman vessel”; bond-the-strawman-to-discharge-the-charge. There is no doctrinal content here for any tribunal to receive. (These are foreclosed in their own right; see the FOIA “strawman” and capitalization-misnomer findings, and the companion finding on the admiralty-court claim.)

Category 2 — genuine seed, wrong routing. The observation that modern enforcement personifies the res, forecloses the owner’s innocence, borrows admiralty’s in rem mechanics, and imposes a commercial/custodial architecture is true and judicially acknowledged. The conference routes it to the worst possible receiver — an “I invoke admiralty” assertion at arraignment — where it cannot register. Routed correctly, the same seed splits into arguments a constitutional court can actually hear:

• Excessive Fines. Civil forfeiture is punishment and is constitutionally constrained. Austin v. United States, 509 U.S. 602 (1993), held forfeiture to be “payment to a sovereign as punishment for some offense” and therefore subject to the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause; United States v. Bajakajian, 524 U.S. 321 (1998), struck a $357,144 forfeiture as grossly disproportional; and Timbs v. Indiana, 586 U.S. 146 (2019), incorporated the Clause against the states in a case where a $42,000 Land Rover had been seized over a drug offense whose maximum fine was $10,000. This is the deodand’s modern check — live and winning.
• Procedural due process. The pre-seizure-notice argument the Calero-Toledo district court actually accepted, relying on Fuentes v. Shevin, 407 U.S. 67 (1972) — it lost on an “extraordinary situation” exception but remains the correct vocabulary.
• Statutory innocent-owner defense. The Civil Asset Forfeiture Reform Act of 2000, 18 U.S.C. § 983(d): “An innocent owner’s interest in property shall not be forfeited under any civil forfeiture statute.” The codified descendant of the Calero-Toledo dicta.

The seed routes to constitutional and statutory tribunals in constitutional and statutory vocabulary. It never routes to an admiralty-jurisdiction assertion in a court that has no admiralty receiver.

6. The custodial duty as a routable lever

The original instinct — that the arresting party’s duty to maintain the ship is significant — deserves to be carried forward, because it slots directly into the asserting-party-inversion analysis.

Within admiralty and forfeiture, the custodial-duty principle is bilateral in form: he who arrests bears the cost of preservation, even if he recovers it first. The Amadea shows the cost is real and consequential. Now apply the asymmetry lens. In ordinary criminal and administrative enforcement, the state performs the functional equivalent of an arrest — of the person (pretrial detention), of property (seizure), of a license or a livelihood — yet bears no analogous preservation or bonding burden. The detainee maintains himself in jail; the state posts nothing. In ordinary civil pre-judgment seizure the seizing party must post a replevin or attachment bond protecting the party seized against; in forfeiture and criminal seizure the sovereign seizes first and posts nothing. The custodial-duty principle is thus one more instance of a protection that exists in the commercial/admiralty sphere and vanishes when the government is the asserting party — even the custodia legis cost is one the sovereign recovers with first priority, or escapes by selling the res.

That reframing is the routable version of the whole instinct. Not “this is an admiralty court,” but: the in rem and custodial architecture the state borrows from admiralty and forfeiture carries reciprocal burdens in its source tradition that the state sheds when it is the seizing party. The first is foreclosed. The second is a structural argument with constitutional purchase.

Verdict

Partially supported. The maritime doctrine in §§1–2 is settled law: a vessel genuinely is a defendant, in rem personification is real, and the arresting agent genuinely owes a first-priority duty to maintain the res. The structural observation beneath the conference folklore — that modern forfeiture descends from the deodand, personifies the “guilty” thing, forecloses the owner’s innocence, and runs on a commercial/custodial architecture — is true and the Supreme Court says so in its own words.

The conference conclusion is foreclosed. “The courts are operating in admiralty,” and the moves that follow from it — invoke admiralty or the UCC, bond the strawman vessel, treat a registration artifact as commercial res — rest on mistaking admiralty-derived procedure for admiralty jurisdiction, and on erasing the public/private line the doctrine maintains. Procedure is not jurisdiction; a tax case is not a maritime case; and the argument draws sanctions rather than a hearing.

What survives is the seed, correctly routed: the Excessive Fines Clause, with Austin, Bajakajian, and Timbs behind it; procedural due process; the statutory innocent-owner defense; and the asymmetry argument that the state sheds, when it is the seizing party, the reciprocal burdens the in rem tradition it borrows from imposes. The arrested ship is real. The deodand is real. The duty to maintain what you seize is real. The claim that any of it makes a traffic court an admiralty court is not — and saying so honestly is the only way to get the real part heard.

• admiralty
• in-rem
• civil-forfeiture
• deodand
• custodia-legis
• excessive-fines
• amadea
• legal-tradition
• impedance
• routing-failure
• asserting-party-inversion
• foundational-claims