What do you want to do with the rest of your life?

Posted on by

This is what I want to do with mine.

A New Breed of Lawyers Focuses on Bicyclists’ Rights

AT the law firm Rankin & Taylor, everybody’s a cyclist.

One recent day, the lawyers there parsed bike-law issues, like “dooring zones” and when is it legally acceptable to ride outside a designated lane, while downstairs, each of their bikes were expertly locked to a scaffold along Broadway in TriBeCa.

The small firm is preparing to bring a class-action suit against New York City on behalf of cyclists over summons handed out for what it contends are phantom violations — bike behavior that it says is not illegal in the city. It is another sign that New York’s bike fights are moving from the streets to the courtroom.

When it comes to bike law, it seems, the wheels of justice no longer grind slowly. Since a ticketing blitz early this year, cyclists in New York have faced stepped-up police enforcement of red-light and other, less-obvious rules, like having adequate lights or not riding with earphones in both ears.

Add to that a highly publicized lawsuit challenging a bike lane along Prospect Park West in Brooklyn, thrown out by a judge last week, and bike law can seem like a growing opportunity for lawyers who make bikes their business.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/21/nyregion/a-new-breed-of-lawyers-focuses-on-bicyclists-rights.html?_r=1.

About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

13 Replies to “What do you want to do with the rest of your life?”

  3. Damn.

    I thought you were going to work for a big Texas coal mining concern advocating to mine and burn highly arsenic and sulfide ridden Eocene coal with no pollution mitigation because it gets in the way of libertarian rights to do whatever you want. I guess you won’t be getting that i-phone then?

  6. …in one sense, while society is embracing the growing & evolving bicycle culture, at the same time, for us as cyclists, it seems to be more dangerous & chaotic on the roads than ever before so there needs be better information & legal protection as we go forward…

    …that is of course a two way street…cyclists need to approach the activity with better intelligence & common sense than they’ve shown in the past but in turn there needs to be a strong legal faction that deals with uninformed & over zealous law makers, enforcers & the motoring public…

    …gianni – more power to you if you can be an agent to affect positive change for & within the cycling world after all the hard work you’ve put in with your studies…perhaps you have a certain advantage, albeit a painful one, considering what you went through after your having been struck by a motor vehicle…

    …here’s hoping you can go in that direction & yet make a healthy living for your family…

  10. On the flip side to this coin, there has been a movement in NYC to punish police officers that give out frivolous tickets that are later dismissed in court.

  12. “…there has been a movement in NYC to punish police officers…”

    Uhmm. Cops kill people and no one cares.

    Tickets ?

    Here’s a quarter. Go buy a clue.

  13. Thank you. (I’m presently a pretty worn out lawyer trying to remember something important, like why I signed up for this.) Thank you. Thank you.