Lawyers have been saying this for a century, and I’ve said it myself: a void judgment is a nullity, and a nullity can be attacked at any time.
It’s a satisfying sentence. As of January 20, 2026, it’s also not safe to lean on in federal court anymore.
What happened
Vista-Pro Automotive went into bankruptcy in 2014 and brought an adversary proceeding against Coney Island Auto Parts Unlimited to collect roughly $50,000 in allegedly unpaid invoices. Vista-Pro tried to serve Coney Island by mail. Coney Island said the mailing didn’t comply with the service requirements of Federal Rule of Bankruptcy Procedure 7004(b)(3). If that’s true, the court never got personal jurisdiction, and the judgment it entered was void.
Coney Island didn’t raise this right away. It raised it years later, under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(4) — the clause that lets a court relieve a party from a judgment because “the judgment is void.”
The problem is Rule 60(c)(1), which says a Rule 60(b) motion must be made “within a reasonable time.” Coney Island argued that void judgments are the exception: a judgment that was never valid in the first place can’t have a clock running on it.
The Court said no, unanimously, in an opinion by Justice Alito. The holding:
Rule 60(c)(1)’s reasonable-time limit applies to a motion alleging that a judgment is void under Rule 60(b)(4).
The reasoning is textual and blunt, and I find it hard to argue with on its own terms. Rule 60(c)(1) says a motion “under Rule 60(b)” must be made within a reasonable time. A Rule 60(b)(4) motion is a motion under Rule 60(b). The Court acknowledged the old line about nullities but pointed out that rules and statutes put time limits on relief from badly flawed judgments all the time. A party can’t wait forever to appeal a judgment just because it thinks the court got jurisdiction wrong.
Justice Sotomayor concurred in the judgment only.
The Court did add something important, and for ordinary people it’s the sentence that matters most: the “reasonable time” standard is flexible, and it makes room for the defendant who honestly didn’t know the case existed.
In Minnesota, that’s the whole ballgame.
Minnesota’s rule looks almost identical
Minnesota’s version is Minn. R. Civ. P. 60.02, and it’s built so close to the federal rule that I read Coney Island with the state rule open next to it:
On motion and upon such terms as are just, the court may relieve a party or the party’s legal representatives from a final judgment (other than a marriage dissolution decree), order, or proceeding . . . for the following reasons: (a) Mistake, inadvertence, surprise, or excusable neglect; (b) Newly discovered evidence . . . ; (c) Fraud . . . , misrepresentation, or other misconduct of an adverse party; (d) The judgment is void; (e) The judgment has been satisfied, released, or discharged . . . ; or (f) Any other reason justifying relief from the operation of the judgment.
And the timing sentence:
The motion shall be made within a reasonable time, and for reasons (a), (b), and (c) not more than one year after the judgment, order, or proceeding was entered or taken.
Read that slowly. The one-year outer limit doesn’t apply to clause (d) — void judgments. But the “reasonable time” requirement, by its own terms, applies to every clause, (d) included.
Coney Island interprets the federal rule. It doesn’t bind Minnesota state courts. But when a Minnesota rule is modeled on its federal twin and uses the same words, Minnesota courts have long found the federal reading of that language persuasive. If you’re a Minnesota lawyer assuming the state rule has no clock for void judgments, that assumption just got a lot harder to defend. I wouldn’t bet a client’s house on it.
Two safety valves survive on the face of the Minnesota rule: Rule 60.02 doesn’t limit a court’s power to entertain an independent action for relief from a judgment, or to set aside a judgment for fraud upon the court. The rule also preserves relief to “a defendant not actually personally notified as provided in Rule 4.043” — but read that one narrowly. Rule 4.043 is a service-by-publication rule. It applies only where the summons was served by publication, and it caps relief at one year after judgment. It’s not an all-purpose escape hatch for a stale address or botched personal service.
Why this isn’t academic here
In Minnesota, a lot of judgments get entered against people who never showed up.
A 2023 statewide access-to-justice study of Minnesota consumer debt litigation put it this way: “The overwhelming majority of debt cases in Minnesota — 82% of district court cases and 54% of conciliation court cases — end in default judgment in favor of the plaintiff.” The gap between those two numbers is the gap between a court ordinary people can handle on their own and one they can’t.
The same study found that two-thirds of debt lawsuits filed in 2020 and 2021 came from just ten firms, and that only about 35% of debt judgments entered between 2017 and 2019 were ever recorded as satisfied. These judgments sit on credit reports, attach to real estate, and back garnishments for years.
A default judgment isn’t automatically void. Most are perfectly good. The defendant got served and didn’t answer. But some real share of them rest on service that never reached anybody. I’ve read affidavits of service describing an address the defendant moved out of years earlier, mail sent to a stale address, a person who just doesn’t live there.
When that happens, the court never got personal jurisdiction, and the judgment is void. That’s the argument. And after Coney Island, the clock on making it isn’t obviously infinite anymore.
What I tell people to do
Say you find out there’s a judgment against you and you don’t remember being sued. Maybe it’s a garnishment notice, a levy on a bank account, or a title company flagging a docketed judgment in the middle of a refinance. The clock matters. My advice runs the same four steps every time.
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Treat the day you found out as day one. “Reasonable time” is measured against what you knew and when. The strongest version of this motion gets filed weeks after you found out, not years.
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Get the file, including the affidavit of service. The paper that decides whether the judgment is void is almost always the return of service. Who got served, where, when, and how — lined up against where you actually lived.
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Don’t pay anything first. A partial payment on a judgment you plan to attack can muddy the argument, and it can restart limitations periods on the underlying debt.
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Don’t confuse “I don’t owe this” with “the court had no jurisdiction.” They’re different motions with different standards and different deadlines. The second one is the powerful one, and it’s the one with the newly confirmed clock.
Coney Island is a case about mail service in a bankruptcy adversary proceeding over $50,000 in auto parts invoices. I expect it’ll be cited for the next thirty years in cases about people who lost a house, a car, or a bank account to a judgment they never knew about.
The Court didn’t say a void judgment turns valid with age. It said you can lose the right to complain about it by sitting on it, and that what counts as sitting on it depends on when you found out. So the most valuable thing a person in this spot has isn’t a legal theory. It’s the date they found out.
If a judgment has shown up against you that nobody told you about, or a garnishment has hit an account out of nowhere, when you respond matters as much as what you argue. Send us a message or call 612-470-6529.
Sources: Coney Island Auto Parts Unlimited, Inc. v. Burton, 607 U. S. 155 (2026) (Alito, J.), No. 24–808, decided January 20, 2026 (Sotomayor, J., concurring in the judgment); Fed. R. Civ. P. 60(b)(4), 60(c)(1); Fed. R. Bankr. P. 7004(b)(3); Minn. R. Civ. P. 60.02 and 4.043 (Minnesota Rules of Civil Procedure, Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes); “Minnesota Consumer Debt Litigation: A Statewide Access to Justice Report” (2023) and Pew Charitable Trusts analysis of Minnesota’s dual civil debt system (2023). This article is general commentary on published decisions and court rules, not legal advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Whether any particular judgment is void, and whether a motion is timely, depends entirely on the facts of that case. No outcome is promised or implied.