The other day, while looking through the Illinois Criminal and Motor Vehicle Law book, I stumbled upon something interesting: a list of all the available specialty license plates in Illinois.  Everyone’s seen a car around with specialty plates before; they’re any car with a license plate besides the typical Illinois plate.  Some common ones are firefighter or state police plates.  But, I never actually realized how many different types are available (over 30 pages worth in the law book alone!!!).  This made us here at Lauralaw want to provide our readers with a list of some of the most obscurely hilarious and interesting plates we could find.

First, we wanted to start with how the plate becomes available for purchase.  Not just anyone can create a plate and put it on their vehicle.  All plates in Illinois have to be approved by the General Assembly before they can be used on the road. Normally, these plates represent different charitable organizations or groups and are used to help raise money when people purchase them.  In order to be passed by the General Assembly, the plates must garner 10,000 applications or any number set by the General Assembly which would be enough to cover the cost of making the plate.  The General Assembly will then pass the plate into law and become available for purchase.  Last year, Governor Rauner signed a bill that becomes law in July that takes away specialty plates in Illinois because they are confusing for law enforcement.  Illinois currently has more than 109 different specialty plates available.

Some of the plates are so obscure that they have us wondering how they could have possibly had over 10,000 people apply for them.   Not to say these organizations aren’t important, we just find some of them so specific and strange that we had no idea more than 10,000 people were passionate about them.   We decided to share a list of our favorites here at the office:

• Wildlife Prairie Park License Plate
• Illinois and Michigan Canal Plates
• Agriculture in the Classroom License Plates
• Illinois Professional Golfers Association Foundation Junior Golf License Plates

And it’s a tossup for our absolute favorite specialty plates between…

Ducks Unlimited License Plates

OR

National Wild Turkey Federation License Plates

For the full list of all the license plates click here.  We want to reiterate that we honestly believe that these are extremely important organizations.  We just never realized how many interesting and funny plates were available in Illinois.  This got us thinking how fun it would be to have our very own Lauralaw specialty license plate!! We would love to see people who are passionate about justice driving around Illinois with Lauralaw plates.  We just hope we can gather the 10,000 applications needed to get it passed by the General Assembly.

While we work on this, if you have any questions or are in need of legal assistance don’t hesitate to contact us and one of our skilled attorneys will be happy to assist you.