A brief survey of mountain bike liability

A frequent argument against new off-road cycling trails is that the landowner will assume some hideous new liability.  The following letter, posted on the IMBA list server, effectively refutes that argument.

"I am a mountain biking attorney involved in trail construction and maintenance as a volunteer on my local trails. I decided to do some national research on reported State and Federal appellate cases involving public and private landowner's liability for "mountain biking" accidents.

I conducted 3 searches in the combined Federal and State Case Law Database on the Lexis research system as follows: 

1. "mountain bike"
2. "mountain biking", and
3. "Mountain bik*" AND injur* OR liability. 

Search #1 returned 149 hits, search #2 returned 27 hits and search #3 returned 75 hits. Most of the hits dealt with issues relating to either access, criminal cases, divorce cases, impairment of ability to mountain bike due to other personal injuries, trademark violations, zoning, product liability cases, concessionaire liability, etc..

What was left were 8 cases, 4 of which dealt with private landowner's liability, 3 dealing with public landowner's liability and 1 case dealing with both private and public landowner's liability. The abridged results are as follows:

The private landowner liability cases were 3 to 1 in favor of no liability for the landowner. The 1 case against the private landowner merely stated that the landowner was not entitled to summary judgment as a matter of law where it posted no warnings and took no apparent action to restrict access to its property. The case was sent back for a trial on the issues. By the way this was not a landowner recreational use statute case.

The public landowner liability cases were 2 to 1 in favor of the landowner. The facts of the 1 case against the public landowner was that the city park in question placed a wire or chain across a non authorized mountain biking trail in order to deter its use. The court found that this was not a reasonably foreseeable or inherent danger associated with mountain biking.

The 1 case involving both a private and a pubic landowner was decided in favor of the landowners based on the applicable state landowners recreational use statute. If there are any attorneys out there who can think of other search parameters that I may have missed please e- mail to let me know.  Any interested parties can also e- mail me for more specific information such as case citations, etc..

I am posting these search results for discussion purposes only. None of the foregoing information may be used or relied upon by any third parties or entities as any type of legal advice or representation whatsoever. That's the lawyer in me speaking."