When Is a Dockside Casino Considered a Vessel?

"When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less," said Humpty Dumpty to Alice in Lewis Carroll's sequel to his 1865 masterpiece, Alice in Wonderland. Or, as a well-known elected official also known for his ability to parse words recently put it, "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is."

A similar through the looking glass experience awaits those whose task it is to define what does and what does not constitute a "vessel" for the purposes of dockside casino gaming. The exercise is not just one of semantics; issues ranging from equipment financing to mortgage lending to the nature of the rights an injured worker may all depend to some extent on whether or not a dockside casino is considered a vessel.

Federal and State courts and the Coast Guard have occasionally found themselves at odds over this. A series of decisions in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit - and in District and Bankruptcy Courts located within that circuit - have held that for purposes of the application of various federal statutes, dockside casinos are not vessels.

The issue arose recently in two bankruptcy cases (the 1995 Biloxi Casino Belle, 176 B.R. 427 (S.D. Miss. 1995) and the 1997 Treasure Bay, 205 B.R. 490 (S.D. Miss. 1997)), in which the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Mississippi concluded that floating dockside casinos were not "vessels" for the purposes of determining the validity and priority of a ship mortgage. Yet the Mississippi Supreme Court in Thompson v. Casino Magic Corporation, 708 So.2d 878 (Sup. Ct. Miss. 1998) pointed out that gambling is Mississippi is legal under state legislation only on "vessels."

In the case of the Biloxi Belle, the court held that the dockside casino was not a vessel even though the Coast Guard had previously documented it as such. The court noted that the Biloxi Belle had very few of the attributes commonly associated with a vessel. For example, it was not capable of moving under its own power, was not seaworthy, had no master or crew concerned with vessel operations other than those activities relating to the casinos, and had no standard maritime equipment such as navigational lights or life saving equipment. The casinos themselves were constructed from "remnants" of two barges, which were cut and welded to form the platform base for the final structures. New superstructures were built to house the gaming operations.

In this instance, the...