Friday, February 21, 2014
The headlines and the stories are all more or less the same: New Jersey has run out of road salt, and a 90-year-old maritime law prevents it from acquiring more. The esoteric law they are referring to is the Jones Act, kind of the foundation of US maritime law. The thing that is holding up the salt is a basic part of international law called cabotage. In a nutshell, foreign flaged ships (and airplanes) can bring stuff to a country, and they can take stuff out of a country, but they can't make deliveries within that country. This is why I can't book a flight to Florida out of JFK on Air Canada. There are a lot of reasons for this rule, and most of them are good ones. My point is, why are people pretending that this is somehow obscure? Sorry about your salt, New Jersey, but don't be thinking that you'll be rewriting hundreds of years of accepted practice because it's snowing.
// posted by Bill @ 4:32 PM 
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