tonnage
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 296 U.S. 261 - Clyde Mallory Lines v. State of Alabama State Docks Commission · 1935Most cited · 194 citing opinions
tonnage' was a well-understood commercial term signifying in America the internal cubic capacity of a vessel.
How the Supreme Court has restated “tonnage”
Each Supreme Court definition of “tonnage,” sized by how often later courts cited it. “Change” is measured by wording overlap with earlier definitions — a rough signal, not a semantic judgment.
How often courts cite the cases defining “tonnage”
Court decisions citing the 2 opinions that defined “tonnage” — 298 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 3 definitions, chronological · 1870–1935
- ORIGINAL
the word tonnage, as applied to American ships and vessels, must be held to mean their entire internal cubical capacity, or contents of the ship or vessel expressed in tons of one hundred cubical feet each, as estimated and ascertained by those rules of admeasurement and of computation.
the word tonnage in commercial designation means the number of tons burden the ship or vessel will carry, as estimated and ascertained by the official admeasurement and computation prescribed by the public authority.