Why Does Maritime Law Govern Cruise Ship Sexual Assault Cases Instead of State Law?
By Alex Perkins, Founding Attorney, Perkins Law Offices
Licensed in Florida, Illinois, and Washington, D.C. | Admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida | Representing survivors nationwide
I am Alex Perkins. I have spent more than 25 years litigating injury cases, and a significant part of my practice involves suing cruise lines on behalf of passengers who were raped or sexually assaulted at sea. Early in almost every consultation, a survivor, a parent, or a referring lawyer from another state asks me the same thing: why does maritime law govern these cruise ship sexual assault cases instead of state law?
Here is the short answer. The assault happened aboard a vessel on navigable water, during an activity tied to maritime commerce. The U.S. Constitution places that kind of injury inside federal admiralty jurisdiction. Once a case is in admiralty, the general maritime law of the United States supplies the rules of liability. The tort law of the state where you live, where you boarded, or where you hired a lawyer takes a back seat.
That answer matters more than it sounds. It decides who the cruise line answers for, what you have to prove, how long you have, which courthouse you must use, and which defenses the cruise line can raise. Below, I walk through each piece the same way I explain it to clients.
What Maritime Law Means for a Cruise Ship Sexual Assault Survivor at a Glance
- Liability: If a crew member assaulted you, the cruise line is generally strictly liable. If a passenger did, the question is whether the cruise line failed to use reasonable care.
- Deadlines: Most tickets require written notice within six months and a lawsuit within one year. Those limits usually override your home state’s longer deadline.
- Where you file: The ticket contract, not your home state, usually picks the federal court, most often Miami.
- Damages: Federal law bars cruise lines from contractually limiting emotional distress damages for victims of sexual assault, sexual harassment, or rape.
- Blame-shifting: Maritime comparative fault can reduce damages, but it does not wipe out a claim the way some state rules can.
Where Admiralty Jurisdiction Comes From
The Constitution and 28 U.S.C. § 1333
Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution extends federal judicial power “to all Cases of admiralty and maritime Jurisdiction.” The founders wrote that clause on purpose. They had watched the colonies and early states apply conflicting rules to ships and sailors, and they wanted one national body of law on the water.
Congress carried that power into the first Judiciary Act in 1789. Today it lives in 28 U.S.C. § 1333, which gives federal district courts original jurisdiction over admiralty and maritime cases. The same statute contains the “saving to suitors” clause, which I address below because it is the main reason state law never disappears entirely.
The Two-Part Test Courts Use
Not every injury near water is a maritime case. The Supreme Court built a two-part test across three decisions: Executive Jet Aviation v. City of Cleveland (1972), Sisson v. Ruby (1990), and Jerome B. Grubart, Inc. v. Great Lakes Dredge & Dock Co. (1995).
The location test. The tort must occur on navigable water. A cruise ship at sea qualifies. So does a ship tied up at the pier in Miami, Galveston, or Seattle, because the dock basin is still navigable water.
The connection test. The incident must have the potential to disrupt maritime commerce, and the activity involved must bear a substantial relationship to traditional maritime activity. Carrying paying passengers on a commercial vessel is about as traditional as maritime activity gets. A sexual assault in a stateroom, a crew corridor, or an onboard nightclub arises directly out of that passenger-carriage relationship.
Uniformity of Federal Maritime
The Supreme Court explained the uniformity principle more than a century ago in Southern Pacific Co. v. Jensen (1917). The Court held that state law cannot be applied where it “works material prejudice to the characteristic features of the general maritime law or interferes with the proper harmony and uniformity of that law in its international and interstate relations.”
Consider a typical seven-night Caribbean itinerary. The ship departs Miami, calls at Nassau, Cozumel, and Roatán, and spends most of the week in international waters. Its passengers can come from all 50 states or internationally. Its crew comes from dozens of countries. The ship itself may fly the flag of the Bahamas, Panama, Liberia or Bermuda.
If state law governed, the cruise line’s duties could shift depending on where a passenger lives or which port the ship last touched. A survivor from Illinois and a survivor from Texas assaulted on the same deck on the same night could face different rules. Maritime law avoids that result by applying one federal standard to everyone aboard.
How Maritime Law Changes a Cruise Ship Sexual Assault Case
1. Crew Member Assaults: Strict Liability
Under general maritime law, a cruise line is a common carrier. Common carriers owe passengers protection from assault by their own employees. Federal courts have applied that rule to cruise ships for decades. The Ninth Circuit recognized it in Morton v. De Oliveira (1993), and the Eleventh Circuit, which covers Florida, applied it to a crew member’s sexual assault of a passenger in Doe v. Celebrity Cruises (2004).
Strict liability means the survivor does not have to prove the cruise line was careless in hiring, training, or supervising the crew member. The cruise line answers for the assault because its employee committed it against a passenger it agreed to carry safely.
Compare that with the law in most states. On land, employers are often not liable for an employee’s sexual assault because courts treat the attack as falling outside the scope of employment. A hotel guest assaulted by a hotel employee frequently has to prove negligent hiring or retention. A cruise passenger assaulted by a cabin steward does not. This is one of the few areas where maritime law favors the passenger, and it is a direct product of maritime law controlling the case.
2. Passenger and Third-Party Assaults: Reasonable Care and Notice
When another passenger commits the assault, the standard changes. In Kermarec v. Compagnie Generale Transatlantique (1959), the Supreme Court held that “a shipowner owes the duty of exercising reasonable care towards those lawfully aboard the vessel who are not members of the crew.” The Eleventh Circuit added in Keefe v. Bahama Cruise Line (1989) that the cruise line must have had actual or constructive notice of the risk-creating condition.
In practice, that means the evidence fight centers on what the cruise line knew and what it did about it:
- Prior sexual assaults on the same ship, in the same venue, or across the fleet.
- Security staffing levels on the deck and at the hour of the assault.
- CCTV coverage, camera blind spots, and whether footage was preserved.
- Alcohol service records, including whether bar staff kept serving a visibly intoxicated passenger or assailant.
- Stateroom keycard entry logs.
- Whether crew escorted the victim, separated the parties, or ignored a warning sign.
Federal statute also sets a floor. The Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2010, codified at 46 U.S.C. § 3507, requires covered vessels to have peepholes and security latches on stateroom doors, time-sensitive key technology, video surveillance, sexual assault forensic kits, crew trained in crime prevention and response, a security log, and prompt reporting of alleged sexual assaults to the FBI. When a cruise line falls short of those requirements, that failure becomes powerful evidence that it did not use reasonable care.
3. Assaults in Port and on Shore Excursions
The cruise line’s duty does not automatically end at the gangway. In Chaparro v. Carnival Corp. (2012), the Eleventh Circuit recognized a cruise line’s duty to warn passengers of known dangers at ports of call where passengers are invited to go ashore. Whether an assault during an excursion supports a claim against the cruise line depends heavily on the facts, including who operated the tour and what the cruise line knew beforehand.
4. Comparative Fault: Blame-Shifting
There is the same defense playbook in nearly every passenger-on-passenger case. The cruise line points to notice and.or consent to alcohol, to the time of night, or to the survivor’s choice to go to a cabin. Let me be direct: intoxication is never consent, and a cruise line that profits from selling drinks cannot claim surprise that intoxicated passengers are vulnerable.
Where comparative fault does come into play, maritime law applies pure comparative fault. Damages may be reduced by a percentage, but the claim survives. Contrast that with Florida, which adopted a modified comparative negligence rule in 2023 that bars recovery entirely if a plaintiff is found more than 50 percent at fault in many negligence cases. That difference alone can decide whether a survivor recovers anything.
5. Deadlines: Shorter Than Most State Law
This is the single most dangerous consequence of maritime law for survivors. Federal law, 46 U.S.C. § 30526, allows a cruise line to require written notice of a claim within six months and a lawsuit within one year. Virtually every major cruise line writes both limits into its ticket contract.
State law often gives sexual assault survivors far more time, and some states have extended or eliminated deadlines for certain sexual abuse claims. None of that helps against a cruise line holding a one-year contractual limit. I have spoken with survivors who waited, reasonably, until they felt able to talk about what happened, only to learn the window was nearly closed. If you are reading this and the date of your cruise is approaching the one-year mark, call a maritime lawyer today.
6. Where You File: The Ticket Decides
Your home state usually does not choose your courthouse. The forum selection clause in your ticket does, and the Supreme Court upheld those clauses in Carnival Cruise Lines v. Shute (1991). As a general guide, based on current ticket terms:
- Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, Virgin Voyages, MSC, Princess Cruises and Norwegian Cruise Line: federal court in Miami, the Southern District of Florida.
- Disney Cruise Line: federal court in Orlando, the Middle District of Florida.
- Holland America: federal court in Seattle, the Western District of Washington.
Ticket terms change, and some lines draw distinctions based on the itinerary. Your own contract, saved in your online booking account, controls. A lawyer who files in the wrong court can lose the case on that mistake alone.
7. Judge or Jury
Claims brought purely under admiralty jurisdiction are tried to a judge, not a jury. Survivors can sometimes secure a jury when the court has an independent basis for jurisdiction, such as diversity of citizenship. That choice is made when the complaint is drafted, which is another reason the first lawyer on the case needs to know maritime procedure.
8. Damages and the Emotional Distress Protection
General maritime law allows recovery of compensatory damages, including medical and counseling costs, lost income, and pain and suffering. Congress added a protection that matters specifically in these cases. Under 46 U.S.C. § 30527, a cruise line cannot use its ticket to limit liability for personal injury caused by its negligence, and it cannot contractually limit emotional distress damages when the passenger was the victim of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape.
Punitive damages under general maritime law remain a contested and fact-specific question in passenger cases. I do not promise them, and no ethical lawyer should.
Where State Law Still Matters
It would be inaccurate to say state law is irrelevant. A complete answer includes the exceptions.
The saving to suitors clause. Section 1333 preserves common-law remedies, which in theory lets a passenger sue in state court. In practice, cruise ticket forum clauses almost always send the case to federal court anyway. Even when a maritime claim is heard in state court, the court must apply substantive maritime law.
Gap-filling. Where general maritime law is silent on an issue, federal courts sometimes borrow state law, as long as it does not conflict with maritime principles. The Supreme Court allowed state remedies to supplement maritime law for the death of a non-seafarer in state territorial waters in Yamaha Motor Corp. v. Calhoun (1996).
Choice-of-law clauses and foreign flags. Cruise ships fly foreign flags, and some tickets name a body of law. Courts resolve competing claims using maritime choice-of-law factors from cases like Lauritzen v. Larsen (1953). For voyages that begin or end in a U.S. port, U.S. general maritime law usually governs passenger claims, but itineraries that never touch the U.S. can raise different issues.
The criminal case is separate. The FBI has jurisdiction to investigate many crimes against U.S. nationals aboard cruise ships, and flag states and port states may also claim jurisdiction. The civil lawsuit against the cruise line proceeds on its own track, under its own rules.
The policy debate. Critics argue maritime law is tilted toward the industry: one-year deadlines, distant forums, and fine-print contracts. Defenders respond that uniform rules are necessary for a global industry.
What Survivors Should Do Now
The general steps after any cruise injury are covered on our cruise ship injury page. These are the steps specific to a sexual assault case governed by maritime law:
- Request a sexual assault forensic exam. The CVSSA requires covered ships to carry kits and provide access to medical care. You may also choose to be examined at a hospital ashore at the next port or upon return.
- Report to the FBI directly if you want to. You can contact the FBI yourself. Ship security works for the cruise line.
- Keep your phone and your messages. Save photos, texts, and call logs, and send copies to someone you trust.
- Find your ticket contract. Download the terms from your booking account and note the notice deadline, the filing deadline, and the forum clause.
- Do not give a recorded statement to the cruise line’s claims department. Speak with a lawyer first.
- Calendar six months and one year from the date of the assault. Treat both as hard stops.
Representing Cruise Ship Sexual Assault Survivors Across the United States
Because the ticket picks the courthouse, where you live does not limit who can represent you. My office is in Miami, where most cruise ship sexual assault cases must be filed, and I represent survivors from across the country. I am admitted to the Southern District of Florida. When a ticket requires filing in another federal court, we follow that court’s admission rules, including working with local counsel where required.
These cases are handled with confidentiality. Federal courts can allow sexual assault survivors to proceed under a pseudonym, and we can request that protection at the start of the case. We handle these cases on a contingency fee basis, so you pay no attorney’s fee unless there is a recovery, and we explain how case costs are handled in writing before you sign anything.
If you were assaulted on a cruise and want to understand whether you have a case, call or text me at (305) 741-5297 or email perkins@perkinslawoffices.com. The consultation is free and confidential. You can also read more on our cruise ship rape and sexual assault page or contact us online.
Frequently Asked Questions About Suing a Cruise Line for Sexual Assault
Can I sue a cruise line if I was sexually assaulted on a cruise ship?
Yes. If a crew member committed the assault, federal courts applying maritime law hold the cruise line strictly liable as a common carrier, as the Eleventh Circuit did in Doe v. Celebrity Cruises (2004). If another passenger or an outsider committed the assault, you must show the cruise line failed to use reasonable care, for example by ignoring a known risk or providing inadequate security. The claim is governed by general maritime law and is usually filed in the federal court named in your ticket contract.
How common are sexual assaults on cruise ships?
Under the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act, cruise lines must report alleged rapes and sexual assaults on voyages that embark or disembark in the U.S. to the FBI, and the U.S. Department of Transportation publishes those numbers every quarter. Sexual assault and rape are consistently the most frequently reported category. DOT figures show 89 reported rapes and sexual assaults in 2022 and 131 in 2023, and independent tallies of the 2025 quarterly reports count roughly 130 of about 180 total reported crimes. Because most sexual assaults are never reported to law enforcement, the true number is higher.
How long do I have to file a cruise ship sexual assault lawsuit?
Most cruise ticket contracts require written notice of the claim within six months and a lawsuit within one year of the incident. Federal law, 46 U.S.C. § 30526, allows cruise lines to impose those limits. That one-year deadline is often far shorter than the deadline your home state would give you, so it controls. Missing it can end the case permanently. See also: How Long Do You Have to File a Cruise Ship Injury Claim?
I do not live in Florida. Where would my cruise ship sexual assault lawsuit be filed?
Your ticket contract usually decides that, not your home state. Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Celebrity, MSC, Princess, Regent, Oceana, P & O and Norwegian generally require suit in federal court in Miami (Southern District of Florida); Disney generally requires the Middle District of Florida in Orlando; Holland America generally requires the Western District of Washington in Seattle. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld these clauses in Carnival Cruise Lines v. Shute (1991). Always confirm the clause in your own ticket.
Can a cruise ticket limit what I recover for emotional trauma after a sexual assault?
No. Federal law, 46 U.S.C. § 30527, prohibits ticket provisions that limit a cruise line’s liability for personal injury caused by its negligence, and it specifically bars contractual limits on emotional distress damages when the passenger was the victim of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape.
Does it hurt my case that I had been drinking?
Intoxication is not consent, and cruise lines sell alcohol knowing intoxicated passengers are vulnerable. When a cruise line argues the passenger shares fault, general maritime law applies pure comparative fault, which can reduce damages but does not bar recovery the way Florida’s 2023 modified comparative negligence rule can.
Will my name become public if I sue?
Not necessarily. Federal courts can permit sexual assault survivors to proceed under a pseudonym such as Jane Doe. The judge decides that request, and we can ask for it at the outset of the case.
How much does it cost to hire a cruise ship sexual assault lawyer?
Perkins Law Offices handles these cases on a contingency fee basis, so you pay no attorney’s fee unless there is a recovery. How case costs are handled is explained in writing before you sign anything. The first consultation is free and confidential.
