Your Rights If You Were Hurt While Driving on a Suspended or Expired License
Your driving privileges have been suspended or you simply forgot to renew your license. You’re out on the road anyway and you’re involved in a wreck caused by the carelessness or negligence of another person. You’ve suffered significant losses, many of which won’t be covered by insurance. Can you still file a personal injury lawsuit, even though you weren’t legally on the road at the time of the crash? Can the other driver seek to have your lawsuit thrown out because your license wasn’t valid?
The Basis for a Motor Vehicle Accident Injury Claim
Though you can always file a lawsuit based on the intentional acts of another person, as a practical matter, most personal injury lawsuits (and most motor vehicle accident claims) are based on a legal theory of negligence. When seeking to establish negligence, the court will look at the care you exercised while driving the vehicle, not at whether or not you had a valid operator’s license. Though the defendant may argue that a reasonable person would not drive with an expired or suspended license, it would still need to be established that your failure to have a valid license actually caused the accident.
Furthermore, even if a jury were to determine that your failure to have a valid drivers license constituted negligence, under New Jersey’s modified comparative negligence approach you would still be able to recover something, provided the jury did not find you more than 50% responsible for causing the accident.
Contact Howard D. Popper, P.C.
At Howard D. Popper, P.C., we can help protect your rights. For a free initial consultation to discuss your options after any type of personal injury, contact our office online or call 973-993-8787 to set up an appointment. We have offices in Morristown and Newton.
We handle all personal injury claims on a contingent fee basis. You won’t pay any attorney fees unless we recover damages for your losses.