May v. Air & Liquid Systems: Maryland Rejects the "Bare-Metal Defense" in Asbestos Cases
For decades, workers who maintained pumps, valves, and engines breathed asbestos dust from the gaskets, packing, and insulation those machines required — and decades later, some of them developed mesothelioma, a cancer with essentially one cause. When their families sued, equipment manufacturers offered a clean-hands answer: we shipped bare metal; someone else made the asbestos parts. Earlier this month, the Court of Appeals of Maryland rejected that defense — and gave asbestos victims in this state a fighting chance against the companies whose products made the exposure inevitable.
The case
In May v. Air & Liquid Systems Corp., 446 Md. 1 (2015), decided December 18, the widow of a Navy machinist who died of mesothelioma sued the manufacturers of the pumps he had maintained. The pumps, as designed, required asbestos-containing replacement gaskets and packing — parts that wore out and had to be replaced periodically for the pumps to function. But the replacement parts the machinist actually handled were made by third parties, not the pump manufacturers. Hence the "bare-metal defense": the pump makers argued they owed no duty to warn about hazards of asbestos components they never made, sold, or placed into the stream of commerce.
Writing for the Court, Judge Adkins rejected the defense in defined circumstances. The Court held that where periodic replacement of asbestos-containing components was integral to the operation of the manufacturer's product, the manufacturer has a duty to warn of the hazards of those asbestos parts — even parts it never made or sold. The holding supports both negligence and strict-liability failure-to-warn claims.
The logic
The ruling is narrow but principled. A manufacturer that designs a product to run on asbestos parts knows, better than anyone, that the product will chew through those parts and that workers will grind, scrape, and replace them for the life of the machine. The foreseeability of the exposure comes from the manufacturer's own design choices. Allowing that manufacturer to disclaim responsibility because the fatal dust technically came off a third party's gasket would elevate supply-chain formalism over the reality it created.
Why this matters
Mesothelioma and other asbestos diseases have latency periods measured in decades. By the time a machinist, steamfitter, or shipyard worker falls ill, the companies that actually manufactured the asbestos components are often bankrupt or untraceable, and the exposure happened so long ago that records are gone. The equipment manufacturers — often still solvent, still identifiable from the ships and plants where the work happened — argued they were categorically out of the case. May closes that escape hatch in Maryland for products whose operation depended on asbestos parts.
The decision also places Maryland on the leading edge of a national debate: courts across the country have split on the bare-metal defense, particularly in maritime asbestos litigation, and Maryland's highest court has now staked out a carefully reasoned position protecting workers.
For this region, the stakes are anything but abstract. Maryland's asbestos legacy runs through the Baltimore shipyards, the steel mills, the power plants, and the building trades — generations of workers who spent careers around machinery that ran on asbestos gaskets, packing, and insulation. Many of those workers, and Navy veterans like the machinist in this case, are only now receiving diagnoses for exposures that ended thirty or forty years ago. For those families, the question of which solvent company can still be brought to account is often the whole case, and May answers it more fairly than the law did a month ago.
What this means for injured people in Maryland
- A mesothelioma diagnosis is a legal emergency as well as a medical one. These cases depend on reconstructing work histories from decades past — ships served on, plants worked in, machines maintained — while the patient can still tell the story. Early testimony can be preserved for the family's case.
- Don't assume the responsible companies are gone. After May, the makers of the pumps, valves, boilers, and engines that required asbestos components are proper defendants when their products' operation made the exposure foreseeable.
- Family exposure counts too. Asbestos cases are not limited to the workers themselves; disease also appears in family members exposed to dust carried home. Every exposure pathway deserves investigation.
Asbestos litigation is document-heavy, defendant-heavy, and unforgiving of delay. It is also emphatically a specialist's field, with consolidated dockets, established discovery protocols, and defendants who have been trying these cases for decades. But Maryland law after May treats these cases the way the facts deserve: the companies that designed asbestos into their products answer for the warnings they never gave.
If you or a loved one has been hurt, call Posey Lebowitz at (202) 524-0123 or send us a message for a free consultation.
Part of our DMV case law archive, compiled in 2026 to reflect the archive of some of the most important decisions in injury law.
Update: Maryland’s approach was later vindicated on the national stage — in Air & Liquid Systems Corp. v. DeVries (2019), the U.S. Supreme Court reached a similar result for maritime asbestos cases.