Faced with a request to exclude evidence that a young man injured when his motorized skateboard collided with a bicyclist on the Georgia Tech campus wasn’t wearing a helmet at the time, a Fulton County judge wasn’t able to find any statute or case law precisely on point.

But there are statutes that bar the introduction of such evidence in cases involving someone under 16 riding a bicycle or an electric bicycle, so Judge Patsy Porter decided to “import the public policy“ of those statutes and apply it to the plaintiff’s motorized skateboard and exclude it.