Judgment liens in Louisiana

What to file, and where

Until it is filed, a Louisiana judgment does nothing to land. Filing is the act that creates the mortgage.

Filing the judgment with the recorder of mortgages is the act that creates a judicial mortgage. La. Civ. Code art. 3300¹ says exactly that, and no more: not when the judgment is signed, not when it is entered, but when it is filed with that officer.

What a judicial mortgage secures is a money judgment. La. Civ. Code art. 3299² confines it to a judgment for the payment of money, which is the ordinary case a creditor arrives with and the only one this page is about.

What it reaches

General is the word for this mortgage, and general here means it attaches to a category of property rather than to one named tract.

It burdens all the obligor's property that the Civil Code makes susceptible of mortgage, or that other law expressly makes subject to judicial or legal mortgage. La. Civ. Code art. 3302³ draws the line there. And a general mortgage, under La. Civ. Code art. 3303⁴, reaches property the obligor owns when the mortgage is created and future property when the obligor acquires it.

What is susceptible of mortgage is a short and closed list. Under La. Civ. Code art. 3286⁵, the only things are a corporeal immovable with its component parts, a usufruct of a corporeal immovable, a servitude of right of use with the holder's rights in constructions on the land, and a lessee's rights in a lease of an immovable with the rights in its constructions. Property that special law makes mortgageable fills a fifth category. A judicial mortgage reaches the first four.

Notice what is not on that list. Land, and rights in land. In Louisiana a judicial mortgage is an instrument against immovables, and a creditor hunting a debtor's bank account or wages is reading the wrong article.

How long it lasts, and renewing it

Two clocks run here, and they are not the same clock. One is the effect of the recordation, which ceases ten years after the date of the judgment. Behind it runs the life of the judgment itself.

Recordation stops working ten years after the date of the judgment. La. Civ. Code art. 3359⁶ fixes that, and it runs from the date of the judgment, not the date of the filing. Neither a suspensive appeal nor a stay of execution touches it: under La. Civ. Code art. 3304⁷, a judicial mortgage is not affected or suspended by either.

On its own schedule, the judgment itself prescribes. Under La. Civ. Code art. 3501⁸, a money judgment of a Louisiana trial court prescribes ten years after its signing if no appeal is taken, or ten years after it becomes final if one is. Before it prescribes, an interested party may revive it, and La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 2031(A)⁹ sets the procedure: an ex parte motion in the court and suit where the judgment was rendered, with an affidavit of the holder and owner that the original judgment has not been satisfied.

Revival is a lighter procedure than most. No citation or service of process is required, and the filing of the motion interrupts prescription running against the judgment. La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 2031(A) provides both, along with the clerk's duty to mail notice of the signing to the debtor at the last known address in the suit record. And it can be done repeatedly: La. Civ. Code art. 3501 lets an interested party revive a money judgment as often as desired, with the revived judgment subject to the same ten-year prescription. The debtor's answer comes after the fact. Under La. Code Civ. Proc. art. 2031(B), the debtor may move to annul the revival by showing the judgment was in fact satisfied before the revival was signed.

What those articles revive is the judgment. Whether reviving the judgment keeps the recordation of the judicial mortgage in effect past the ten years of La. Civ. Code art. 3359 is a separate question, and the articles here do not answer it. This page will not guess. How long a judgment lien lasts, and how renewal interacts with it, is a question a creditor works out before the clock runs, not after.

Land in another county

Louisiana has parishes, not counties. Recordation follows the land.

An instrument creating or relating to a mortgage over an immovable is recorded in the mortgage records of the parish where the immovable is located. La. Civ. Code art. 3346(A)¹⁰ says so. Read beside La. Civ. Code art. 3300, which creates the judicial mortgage by filing the judgment with the recorder of mortgages, the practical point is that a judgment recorded in one parish does not reach immovables sitting in another.

The same track carries a federal court judgment. A judgment of a United States court of original jurisdiction in Louisiana, when recorded in a parish's mortgage records, ranks as a judicial mortgage against the debtor's immovable property in that parish, to the same extent Louisiana gives its own courts' recorded judgments. La. R.S. 13:4204¹¹ so provides.

That a judgment may sit in more than one parish at once is visible even from the cancellation side of the law. La. R.S. 9:5175(A)(1)¹², dealing with the aftermath of a bankruptcy discharge, speaks of cancelling the judgment from the records of the parish and of any other parish in which the judgment is recorded. One judgment, several parishes, each recordation its own act.

Homestead here, in one paragraph

Louisiana shields a homestead by value, and the value is low enough that a creditor should know the number before anything else.

The bona fide homestead is the residence the owner occupies with the land it sits on, plus contiguous tracts up to five acres inside a municipality or two hundred acres outside one. La. R.S. 20:1(A)(1)¹³ draws those bounds. It is exempt from seizure and sale under any writ, mandate, or process, under La. R.S. 20:1(A)(2), except as subsections C and D provide.

Thirty-five thousand dollars in value of the homestead is what the exemption covers. La. R.S. 20:1(A)(2) sets that figure, with one carve-out: for obligations arising directly from a catastrophic or terminal illness or injury, the exemption applies to the full value, measured one year before the seizure. That floor is low, and value above it is reachable.

Some debts the homestead does not stand against at all. The exemption does not apply to the purchase price, to labor and material for building or repairing the homestead, to taxes or assessments, to rent bearing a privilege on the property, to a loan by a homestead or building and loan association on the security of the property, to money advanced on a mortgage on it, or to obligations arising from certain criminal convictions. La. R.S. 20:1(C) lists them. And the owner can give it up: La. R.S. 20:1(D) permits a written waiver, which a married person not separated from bed and board cannot sign alone, and which is recorded in the mortgage records of the parish where the homestead sits. How Louisiana's homestead compares with other states is its own subject, taken up in the state-by-state view of homestead protection.

Where the records live

One office, one act, and a name that most states do not use.

Filing the judgment with the recorder of mortgages is what creates a judicial mortgage, under La. Civ. Code art. 3300, and it secures a judgment for the payment of money, under La. Civ. Code art. 3299. That is the whole mechanism in a sentence. Ask the recorder of mortgages in the parish where the land lies, for the date the judgment was filed and the date the judgment carries, because the ten-year clock runs from the second of those.

This page is Louisiana, and Louisiana only. Other jurisdictions each run their own filing act and their own clocks, laid out in the state-by-state view of how a judgment becomes a lien. Whether to record, where, or whether to revive a judgment before it prescribes is a question for counsel with the file open. What a page can do is name the office and the two dates that decide the matter.