§ 694.030.Period For Enforcement of Judgment; Renewal of Judgment

Judgments entered before the 1983 changeover needed a rule for how long they'd remain enforceable under the new law. Subdivision (a) answers that: except for judgments described in §§ 683.310 or 683.320, the enforcement period for a pre-operative-date money judgment or possession-or-sale judgment is governed, from the operative date forward, by Chapter 3 (commencing with § 683.010) — the same renewal framework that applies to judgments generally.

Subdivision (b) addressed a narrower problem: judgments whose renewal deadline under the old ten-year rule of former § 681 had already passed by the time the new law took effect, and that therefore couldn't be renewed under the new Chapter 3 framework either. It let the court that entered such a judgment authorize renewal anyway, if the court determined that authority to enforce the judgment beyond the old ten-year period would have been granted under former § 685, and the court exercised its discretion to allow it. That determination had to come on a noticed motion filed within two years after the operative date, with notice served on the debtor personally or by mail.

That two-year window closed in 1985, so subdivision (b)'s rescue provision is no longer available to anyone — it now describes a historical fix rather than a live option. Subdivision (a)'s rule folding pre-1983 judgments into the ongoing Chapter 3 renewal framework remains the operative principle for any such judgment still being renewed today.