A Prize Court is a formal organization dedicated to the disposition of items captured from an enemy.

Because the Colonies were more or less building it all from the ground up, much of what they adopted came directly from the British. As a result the Prize Court and its structure is a British institution that made its way over here. This doesn’t happen anywhere else in the world, though in the early 20th Century an International Prize Court was proposed and established, but it was never ratified or implemented.

So it’s still just the British, which maintains a formal court, and the United States, which largely followed the original committee recommendation by largely leaving it up to the individual states.

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