The Trump administration is reaching back to a legal doctrine older than the Constitution itself to speed up the seizure of Iranian oil tankers.
Aaron Reitz, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, confirmed to Fortune that the Justice Department is reviving prize law — a body of maritime rules allowing military forces to seize enemy vessels. 'Prize law is an ancient body of maritime law—already codified in statute but which we are now reviving—that sets the rules for how seized maritime property is condemned, returned, or disposed of,' Reitz said in a statement.
The move would let U.S. forces bolster the naval blockade of Iran and recoup war costs. Unlike civil seizure law, which requires the government to prove a specific statutory violation and often drags through extensive litigation, prize law lets the Department of Defense seize an enemy vessel through military force without a warrant tied to an existing statute, according to Michael Frevola, a maritime litigation partner at Holland & Knight LLP.
The legal basis runs deep. The Constitution's Captures Clause lays out rules for confiscating enemy vessels during wartime. President Abraham Lincoln invoked the Prize Act of 1812 to blockade Confederate seaports, an act the Supreme Court ultimately upheld. The doctrine was last used during the Spanish-American War in 1898, when it legitimized the U.S. naval detainment of Spanish vessels.
The financial upside is explicit. 'There's definitely a financial interest in being able to sell the oil and being able to sell the vessel and then just put that money into the coffers of the United States, which is another thing that this administration has shown is a priority,' said Raymond Waid, a veteran naval officer and maritime lawyer at Liskow and Lewis.
But the law's age cuts both ways. 'It's not like the DOJ has some really veteran Prize Act litigators on their staff,' Frevola quipped. 'So we'd have to conduct a séance to wind up getting serious counsel in terms of this.'
Legal complications loom. The government must prove any capture occurs during hostilities within congressional and presidential authority — and Congress has not declared war on Iran, which Waid suggested could push lawmakers into a dispute they've largely sidestepped. Allison Luzwick, also of Holland & Knight, said the U.S. will likely face litigation over whether the blockade was properly declared and communicated, particularly for neutral vessels carrying third-country cargo.
Power leaves a paper trail, and this one runs straight through Article I. Reviving a mechanism baked into the Constitution — rather than inventing new executive authority — is precisely the kind of lawfare Washington's critics on the left will contest and that free-enterprise-minded observers should welcome: a faster, cheaper route to enforcing sanctions that doesn't leave the taxpayer footing the bill for years of civil litigation while hostile regimes profit from stolen crude.
The skepticism from maritime lawyers is fair warning, not a verdict. Old law or not, the administration is choosing the tool the Founders actually wrote into the Constitution over the sprawling administrative apparatus civil seizure law demands. If Tehran's tankers end up funding U.S. war costs instead of the Islamic Republic's coffers, that is a market outcome even skeptics of executive overreach should recognize as sound: capital and cargo answering to the rule of law, not to the regime that stole them.
