Then a police officer rolled by in his squad car. He called Mr. VanRy over, and handed him the summons. Few people would be happy in that situation. But most would figure that the path of least resistance was to pay the 25 bucks.

Not Mr. VanRy, who is 40 and works for a supplier of stock film footage, video and music. He challenged the summons. He got a lawyer. He filed motions. He showed up in court four times. No, he corrected himself, make that five times. For one reason or another, delays kept coming.

It just didn’t seem right to him to be ticketed for sitting on his own stoop bothering no one. As he saw it, this was an example of “the government poking its nose into what heretofore would have been considered private parts of our lives or private parts of our space.”

“I also think,” he said, “that it goes against some long-held traditions, particularly in the outer boroughs, of sitting outdoors and meeting people that walk by randomly. You get to know each other’s names and their dogs’ names. That’s one of the charming parts of living in one of the boroughs.”

Image Kimber VanRy on the stoop in Brooklyn that may help define the public-drinking law. Credit... Michelle V. Agins/The New York Times

As the case wore on, “the reaction of judges and even some court officers was sort of amazement that somebody would follow through on this,” he said. Also intrigued were many readers of a community newspaper, The Brooklyn Paper. They responded to, and debated, a series of articles about the Battle of the Stoop.