Suspended Driver’s License

Bankruptcy gives you immediate and long-term relief from your debts. But it can do other very important things you may not know about. Today we get into how bankruptcy can reinstate a suspended driver’s license.

Reasons for Driver’s License Suspension

Whether your filing of a bankruptcy case can reinstate your suspended driver’s license depends on the reason for the suspension. Two of the most common kinds are suspensions are from:

1) not paying a judgment from a motor vehicle accident while driving uninsured; and

2) failing to pay traffic tickets.

This blog post focuses reinstating your license from the first one of these kinds of suspension. We’ll get to the second one next.

Judgment from a Vehicle Accident While Driving Uninsured

A person gets into a car accident while driving uninsured. The accident results in some property damage and/or personal injury for the other driver(s) or for passengers. The other driver or somebody else involved sues the person (usually through their insurance company). The person sued then gets a judgment against him or her from that lawsuit. That judgment legally establishes that the uninsured driver owes damages arising out of the accident. The judgment determines that the driver was at least partially at fault and must pay those damages.

If such a judgment was taken against you, your state’s laws likely gave you a very limited amount of time to pay that judgment. So what happens if you don’t pay it off within that time?

You guessed it: your driver’s license gets suspended. The idea is that you failed to fulfill your financial responsibilities as a driver. You legally owe a debt from an accident that you were at least partially at fault for. And it’s a debt that you didn’t pay, probably because you didn’t have insurance.
Bankruptcy Wipes Out the Debt, No More Reason for the Suspension

The good news is that by filing bankruptcy you can discharge (legally write off) that debt. As soon as you no longer owe that debt, the reason that your license got suspended is gone. So the license can be reinstated.

If your driver’s license was, or is about to be, suspended because of an unpaid debt arising from an uninsured motor vehicle accident, see a Louisville bankruptcy lawyer. There’s a good chance you can reinstate your license—or prevent it from being suspended—through bankruptcy.

If you have questions about Bankruptcy, please call the Minneapolis Bankruptcy Lawyer, Brea Buettner-Stanchfield at 612-377-5311.