Here is a sentence lawyers have repeated for a century: a void judgment is a nullity, and a nullity can be attacked at any time.
It is a satisfying sentence. It is also, as of January 20, 2026, no longer safe to rely on in federal court.
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’s position was that the mailing did not comply with the service requirements of Federal Rule of Bankruptcy Procedure 7004(b)(3) — which, if true, meant the court never acquired personal jurisdiction and the resulting judgment was void.
Coney Island did not raise this immediately. 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 a void judgment is an exception: because it was never a valid judgment at all, no clock could run on challenging it.
The Court rejected that 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. 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 maxim about nullities but pointed out that rules and statutes routinely put time limits on relief from judgments infected by serious error — a party cannot wait indefinitely to appeal a judgment merely because it thinks the judgment is wrong on jurisdictional grounds.
Justice Sotomayor concurred in the judgment only.
The Court did add something important, and it is the sentence that matters most to ordinary people: the “reasonable time” standard is flexible, and it accommodates the situation where a defendant genuinely did not know the case existed.
That is the whole ballgame in Minnesota.
Minnesota’s rule looks almost identical
Minnesota’s counterpart is Minn. R. Civ. P. 60.02, and its architecture is close enough that anyone reading Coney Island should look at it carefully:
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 carefully. The one-year outer limit does not apply to clause (d) — void judgments. But the “reasonable time” requirement, by its own terms, applies to every clause, including (d).
Coney Island construes the federal rule and does not bind Minnesota state courts. But when a Minnesota rule is modeled on its federal analogue and uses the same words, Minnesota courts have long found federal construction of that language persuasive. A Minnesota lawyer who assumes the state rule has no clock for void judgments is making an assumption that just got materially harder to defend.
Two safety valves survive on the face of the Minnesota rule: Rule 60.02 does not 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 is not a general escape hatch for stale-address or defective personal service.
Why this is not an academic problem here
Minnesota is a state where a great many judgments are entered against people who never appeared.
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 forum ordinary people can navigate and one they cannot.
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 are judgments that sit on credit reports, attach to real estate, and support garnishment for years.
A default judgment is not automatically void. Most are perfectly valid — the defendant was served, and did not answer. But some meaningful fraction of them rest on service that never actually reached anyone: a summons left at an address the defendant moved away from three years ago, service by mail to a stale address, an affidavit of service describing a person who does not live there.
When that happens, the court never obtained personal jurisdiction, and the judgment is void. That is the argument. And the clock on making it, after Coney Island, is no longer obviously infinite.
What to actually do
If you learn that a judgment exists against you and you do not remember being sued — a garnishment notice, a levy on a bank account, a title company flagging a docketed judgment during a refinance — the response is time-sensitive.
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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 is filed weeks after discovery, not years.
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Get the file, including the affidavit of service. The document that decides whether the judgment is void is almost always the return of service. Who was served, where, when, and by what method — compared against where you actually lived.
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Do not pay anything first. Partial payment on a judgment you intend to attack can complicate the argument, and it can restart limitations periods on the underlying debt.
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Do not confuse “I don’t owe this” with “the court had no jurisdiction.” They are different motions with different standards and different deadlines. The second one is the powerful one, and it is the one with the newly-confirmed clock.
The larger point
Coney Island is a case about mail service in a bankruptcy adversary proceeding over $50,000 in auto parts invoices. It will 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 did not say a void judgment becomes valid with age. It said the right to complain about it can be forfeited by sitting on it — and that what counts as sitting on it depends on when you found out.
Which means the most valuable thing a person in this position has is not a legal theory. It is the date they learned.
If a judgment has appeared against you that you were never told about, or a garnishment has hit an account without warning, the timing of the response matters as much as the merits. Send us a message or call 612-470-6529.
Sources: Coney Island Auto Parts Unlimited, Inc. v. Burton, 607 U. S. ___ (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.