Can a motorcycle not be considered a motor vehicle in a legal dispute?

[FE3O4ENAIL]

Lets say I buy a classic bike. It is titled in my name after I buy it, but never registered.
I procede to restore it back to like new condition. I do not install a battery, oil or gas.
It is so nice to look at I put in my study as Art.
The house burns down and the insurance company doesn’t want to pay because the contract clearly states the building, my home, is not to used for the storage or repair of motor vehicles.
Is the bike in my study a motor vehicle as defined by the contract?

As always this is just a thought experiment, no fire has occured.
I was just wondering because a gun can be converted legally to a non-gun by following a known set of rules and welding the action to be non-functional.
Would I have to weld the engine tight, or leave out the pistons, or will a titled motorcycle always be a motor vehicle?

[pravnik]

I’m afraid you’ve hit upon one of the core unsettled issues of modern jurisprudence, the Hart-Fuller debate.

[FE3O4ENAIL]

From the Wiki link above:
“… banning vehicles from the park. For example, if the purpose were to prevent noise pollution, a bicycle would not be a vehicle for the purposes of the law”

Interesting.

[Musicat]

@FE3O4ENAIL

Would I have to weld the engine tight, or leave out the pistons, or will a titled motorcycle always be a motor vehicle?

Check the wording in your insurance policy. There is probably a clause defining “motor vehicle.”

[FE3O4ENAIL]

“Whether the device driven by the defendant in a DWI case is a “motor vehicle” is usually not an issue. A car, truck, van, or jeep is a motor vehicle; a bicycle is not. When issues have arisen regarding whether an inoperable or unmovable vehicle was a “motor vehicle” within the statutory definition, the courts have usually offered a broad definition to include such vehicles.”

I found the above quote which means I should not sit on the “Art” when drunk, I guess.

[pravnik]

It’s a very brief summary of a debate between two law professors about the philosphy that should underlie judicial interpretation of the law. Hart started the conversation by imagining a hypothetical statute:

The insight of this school may be presented in the following example. A legal rule forbids you to take a vehicle into the public park. Plainly this forbids an automobile, but what about bicycles, roller skates, toy automobiles? What about airplanes? Are these, as we say to be called “vehicles” for the purpose of the rule or not? If we are to communicate with each other at all, and if, as in the most elementary form of law, we are to express our intentions that a certain type of behavior be regulated by rules, then the general words we use-like “vehicle” in the case I consider-must have some standard instance in which no doubts are felt about its application. There must be a core of settled meaning, but there will be, as well, a penumbra of debatable cases in which words are neither obviously applicable nor obviously ruled out.

These cases will each have some features in common with the standard case; they will lack others or be accompanied by features not present in the standard case. Human invention and natural processes continually throw up such variants on the familiar, and if we are to say that these ranges of facts do or do not fall under existing rules, then the classifier must make a decision which is not dictated to him, for the facts and phenomena to which we fit our words and apply our rules are as it were dumb. The toy automobile cannot speak up and say, “I am a vehicle for the purpose of this legal rule,” nor can the roller skates chorus, “We are not a vehicle.” Fact situations do not await us neatly labeled, creased, and folded, nor is their legal classification written on them to be simply read off by the judge. Instead, in applying legal rules, someone must take the responsibility of deciding that words do or do not cover some case in hand with all the practical consequences involved in this decision.

Fuller took exception with the concept that concept that even a law as simple as the “no vehicles in the park” example has a core of settled meaning:

If the rule excluding vehicles from parks seems easy to apply in some cases, I submit this is because we can see clearly enough what the rule “is aiming at in general” so that we know there is no need to worry about the difference between Fords and Cadillacs. If in some cases we seem to be able to apply the rule without asking what its purpose is, this is not be- cause we can treat a directive arrangement as if it had no purpose. It is rather because, for example, whether the rule be intended to preserve quiet in the park, or to save carefree strollers from injury, we know, “without thinking,” that a noisy automobile must be excluded. What would Professor Hart say if some local patriots wanted to mount on a pedestal in the park a truck used in World War II, while other citizens, regarding the proposed memorial as an eyesore, support their stand by the “no vehicle” rule? Does this truck, in perfect working order, fall within the core or the penumbra?

There might be a more straightforward answer to you question, although I suspect it will depend heavily on the exact wording in the contract and the law of the jurisdiction. I only bring up the Hart-Fuller debate because the question of “when is a vehicle not a vehicle” is one that professors have been beating up law students with for decades, and your hypo sounds like a pretty close variant of the classic question.