Legislated by Congress in 1988, the Abandoned Shipwreck Act ("ASA" or "the Act") is among the handful of federal statutory enactments that govern the exploration, management, and ownership of underwater cultural heritage sites, including sunken historic shipwrecks. The ASA was designed to address issues of federal-state coordination of preservation efforts for such sites, prescribe federal policy guidelines, and, most importantly of all, establish principles of title over what could be very valuable shipwrecks and their cargo. The Act has largely failed in achieving these objectives. But, even more pertinently, provisions of the ASA have been extensively litigated, resulting in significant cases even reaching the U.S. Supreme Court, and conflicting decisions have caused difficulties for practitioners in the maritime field.
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