§ 149.002.Applicability

An applicability provision with a historical cut-off and a long exclusion list.

Subsection (a) applies the limitations to a domestic or foreign corporation that has had a certificate of authority or done business in Texas and became a successor prior to May 13, 1968 — or is one of that successor’s own successors, in which case only to the extent of the limitation applied under the prior-transferor rule.

The 1968 date is the heart of the chapter. It confines the cap to mergers completed before asbestos liability was widely understood, when a corporation acquiring another had no way to price the risk it was taking on.

A merger after that date is outside the chapter entirely, on the reasoning that the acquirer could have known.

Subsection (b) lists eight exclusions, and they mark where the Legislature declined to protect successors:

Workers’ compensation benefits; any claim not constituting a successor asbestos-related liability; an insurance corporation; obligations under the National Labor Relations Act or a collective bargaining agreement; a successor that continued in the asbestos business after the merger; a contractual obligation existing at the chapter’s effective date resolving asbestos claims; claims in bankruptcy proceedings commenced before April 1, 2003 or against a section 524(g) trust; and premises liability claims, including under the independent contractor chapter, where the successor owned or controlled the premises after the merger.

The fifth and eighth are the principled ones. A successor that kept mining, selling or installing asbestos is liable for its own conduct, not an inherited liability — and so is one whose own premises exposed people after the merger.