In many cities, food trucks clearly are enjoying their moment in the sun. These meal-on-wheels establishments have gone from catering to a sliver of the bargain-conscious lunch crowd to serving the masses.

What’s not to like?  Set aside the exhaust fumes and occasional gnawing concern about hygiene, and you can get it all from a truck window: Halal meat, crepes, pizza, gourmet cupcakes.

Food trucks in fact are so established they now have their own go-to lawyer, Bert Gall (pictured), who specializes in defending food trucks against what he considers unfair regulations, according to this profile from the Washington Post.

A senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, Gall directs the institute’s National Street Vending Initiative, which bills itself as “a nationwide effort to vindicate the right of street vendors to earn an honest living by fighting unconstitutional vending restrictions in courts of law and the court of public opinion.”

The restaurant community and its allies have proposed ideas to neutralize what they view as food trucks’ unfair advantages, including lower tax burdens and the ability to park wherever the vendors please, the Post reports.

But Gall and his group have fought back. The institute, for example, represented El Paso food vendors in a federal lawsuit which persuaded El Paso to agree to overturn a 2009 city law that prohibited trucks from operating within 1,000 feet of an established restaurant, grocery or other food store, according to the Post.

Gall also is the co-author of “Streets of Dreams,” a report that claims that regulations in America’s fifty largest cities allegedly are stifling street vending for no other purpose than to protect brick-and-mortar businesses.

Gall told the Post that he views the cities cited in the report as a “potential litigation target.”

Find the original article from blogs.wsj.com <here>