Merchant Marine Act 1920, section 27 (cabotage)

The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, 41 Stat. 988, is the other Jones Act. Section 27 is the cabotage rule. Cabotage means coastwise traffic: the transportation of goods by water between two points of the United States is reserved to ships built, owned, and crewed in the United States as the statute requires. Puerto Rico is inside that coastwise map. The Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917 is not this statute. The titles on this board say so on purpose.

Because the island is an island, almost everything heavy arrives by sea. A rule written to protect a continental merchant marine therefore lands as a price and a schedule in San Juan, Ponce, and the south coast. This lesson is not a shipping cost sheet. It invents no percentage for food prices. CRS has written the legal framework, including later exemption fights. The finding here is one of identity: when someone says 'the Jones Act' in a dockside conversation, they usually mean cabotage, not citizenship.

Congress has exempted the rule in emergencies and refused to repeal it in ordinary years. Those fights are current politics. The 1920 text is the origin. It sits three years after Jones-Shafroth and has another sponsorship story, another Statutes at Large volume, and another trade. Compressing them into a single 'Jones Act' is how both lessons get lost. Citizenship is lesson 05. Ships are lesson 07.

Spanish speakers often keep the English name, Jones Act, for the shipping rule, and that is how the confusion hardens. This journal will keep saying Merchant Marine Act, section 27, cabotage. The current codification is 46 U.S.C. section 55102. Whoever wants the citizenship statute should leave this page. Whoever wants a hurricane logistics essay should go to Landfall. PROMESA and María are also not this statute.

The honesty line is the title label. Merchant Marine Act 1920, section 27, cabotage. Forty-one Statutes at Large, page 988. Not Pub. L. 64-368. Not 39 Stat. 951. Two Jones acts. If this site printed only one, it would be teaching the confusion. It prints both, in order, with the trades in the titles.

The numbered finding stays with the public law, the rubric, or the scrutiny. This lesson invents no percentage, no headcount, and no date that the sources of this page do not support. The English terms are glossed in the text so the statute reads without a manifesto.

Sources: 46 U.S.C. sección 55102, comercio de cabotaje; CRS, Puerto Rico y la Jones Act. Freeze 2026-08-22.