Given that a liquor license is “the” key asset in a business selling alcoholic beverages, be it a restaurant or package goods store, violations of laws associated with those licenses are of great import. The twenty three counties in Maryland, Baltimore City, and the City of Annapolis each issue retail alcoholic beverages licenses and local boards of liquor license commissioners police activities under those licenses. This blog post is a review of retail liquor license…

A liquor license holder in Maryland may now be issued more than one restaurant liquor license. Effective July 1, 2018, House Bill 2018-1003, now Chapter Laws 225, authorizes a single individual to hold multiple Class B, beer, wine, and liquor licenses or equivalent licenses issued by different local liquor licensing boards for restaurants, hotels, or motels. Nancy Hudes has focused experience advising chain restaurants and other with multiple restaurant locations about alcoholic beverage licensing matters.…

You may not yet know that you need an expert witness? But, in a public hearing before a Board of Liquor License Commissioners, expert witness testimony often is admitted when the Board determines that the testimony will assist it, as the trier of fact, to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue. Thomas Jefferson may be the earliest known expert witness in an American court when in 1771 in Hite v. Fairfax,…

I have just returned from a month of mountain climbing in Pakistan where alcoholic beverages are banned. Pakistan has the world’s greatest concentration of high peaks and glaciers, with more than 160 summits of over 6,000 meters and a beauty, isolation and sheer immensity like nothing else on the planet. It was this wilderness of ice and rock that Eric Shipton called “the epitome of mountain grandeur” that drew me to the confluence of the…

  The transfer of a liquor license often involves issues of life and death, and in some instances, zombies and phantoms. A decision last year by the Maryland Court of Special Appeals in Liquor License Commissioners for Baltimore City v. Austin was instructive as to when a liquor license is really dead. The court explains at the beginning of the 25 page opinion, .. a zombie is defined as the supernatural power according to voodoo…

While it is difficult to comprehend what new liquor licensing laws could possibly be enacted in Maryland after the legislature passed the largest bill in Maryland history, only 2 years ago in 2016, some 3,180 pages long, re-codifying the alcoholic beverage laws, this is review of just that .. At the close of the just concluded 438th session of the Maryland General Assembly on April 9, 2018, 1,269 Senate bills and 1,832 House bills were…

Among the more curious environmental issues of the day appears to be criminalizing plastic drinking straws and stirrers. The “war on drinking straws” must be true because this week there is a viral video viewed on YouTube more than 5.5 million times of a 2015 incident where a Texas A&M University research team in Costa Rica found a plastic straw stuck in the nose of a sea turtle. Then there is the widely tossed around…