Maryland Does Not Recognize a Duty, and Said So Again in 2013

Last reviewed September 2026

Maryland has no dram shop statute and no dram shop liability. Its highest court considered the question again in 2013, on facts as bad as they come, and declined — four to three — to create a duty.

Warr v. JMGM Group, LLC, 433 Md. 170, 70 A.3d 347 (2013)

There is no Maryland dram shop act. Counsel should begin from that, and from the fact that the absence is deliberate and has been reaffirmed rather than overlooked.

Maryland has no dram shop statute, and its highest court has repeatedly declined to create one. In 2013 it put the position without qualification: “Simply put, we just do not recognize a duty; instead we adhere to the principle that ‘[h]uman beings, drunk or sober, are responsible for their own torts.’”

Standard for liability

The court reached that conclusion through duty rather than through causation. The general rule it applied is that there is no duty to control a third person’s conduct so as to prevent harm to another unless a special relationship exists — either between the defendant and the third person, or between the defendant and the person injured.

The court framed the question as one it had considered before and declined again: “We shall decline to impose dram shop liability on Dogfish Head in the absence of any duty owed by the tavern to the Warrs.”

The facts are worth knowing because they mark the boundary. The patron was served at least twenty-one drinks over about six hours, became aggressive, drove at very high speed and killed a ten-year-old child. The court still found no duty. An argument that a Maryland tavern’s conduct was egregious enough to create one is an argument that has already been made and lost on stronger facts than most files contain.

Because the position is judicial, counsel should read the current authorities directly rather than rely on any summary, including this one, for where the law stands today.

Social hosts

The decision concerned a commercial vendor. Maryland’s treatment of social hosts, including any liability for furnishing alcohol to minors, is a separate line of authority and is not addressed by the holding set out above.

Counsel with a private-host fact pattern should research that line directly rather than assuming the commercial rule transfers in either direction.

Minors

The decision above concerned service to an adult patron. It does not purport to settle the position for service to a minor, and this page does not state one.

A Maryland matter involving an underage drinker should be researched on its own authorities. Nothing here should be read as establishing that the same result follows.

Training, responsible-vendor, and safe-harbor provisions

There being no statute and no recognized duty, there is no statutory training requirement and no safe-harbor defense for a Maryland tavern to rely on — and nothing for training evidence to bear on so far as a dram shop claim is concerned.

Where a Maryland matter proceeds on a different basis — a premises claim, a negligent-security claim, or a claim against a party other than the server — training and supervision records can be central to that claim, and the operational analysis below is directed at those.

Operational evidence commonly examined in Maryland cases

• Concession service records at a stadium or arena: per-transaction limits and whether the point-of-sale enforced them or merely stated them.
• The stated cut-off time and transaction data after it, which is the most damaging concession record there is.
• In-seat and mobile ordering data, which identifies a guest and their whole evening in a way cash concession sales never do.
• Suite and club-level hosted-bar service, which leaves no per-drink record and is frequently where the volume was.
• The concourse supervisor roster, and whether those roles were filled on the night.
• For a waterfront or district venue, door assessment on arrival, since a guest who arrived impaired was assessed by somebody or by nobody.
• For a seasonal crab house or waterfront restaurant, pitcher service and long dwell times, which are easy for a server to lose track of precisely because they are slow.

The expert’s role

In a state with no vendor duty, an operations expert is generally working an adjacent claim — premises conditions, security, crowd management, or the conduct of a concessionaire. The discipline is the same and the duty is different. Preston Rideout holds two Maryland alcohol-service certifications, and his work on high-capacity concession and suite-level service bears directly on the venues from which Maryland matters most often come.

Preston Rideout completed Techniques of Alcohol Management (TAM) for Maryland; what that lets him evaluate in a Maryland matter, and the records it makes discoverable, is set out at Maryland certified expert witness.

Primary sources

• Warr v. JMGM Group, LLC, 433 Md. 170, 70 A.3d 347 (2013) — opinion published by the state at www.mdcourts.gov

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