§ 9-10-200.Action for recovery of realty and mesne profits

This section hands lawyers a template complaint for one of the oldest disputes in property law: someone else is on the land, and the owner wants it back — along with whatever that occupant made from it while sitting on the title. The plaintiff fills in a description of the tract, names the defendant in possession, and states that ownership belongs to the plaintiff.

The form splits the claim into two short numbered paragraphs. The first establishes that the defendant holds the land while the plaintiff claims title to it. The second adds the money piece: the defendant has collected profits from the property — rents, crops, timber, whatever it yielded — since a stated date, and has refused either to give back the land or to hand over those profits. That second piece is the mesne profits named in the section’s title: the value that built up during the period of wrongful possession, separate from the value of the land itself.

Georgia labels this a form the pleading “may be,” not one it must be — a sample rather than a mandate. Because the Civil Practice Act calls for only a short, plain statement of the claim, this template shows how little language a real-property recovery action needs, leaving the tract description, dates, and dollar figures to the facts of each case.

The form’s roots run deep: its history traces to Georgia’s 1863 Code and carried through every major recodification since, with a last technical touch-up in 1999. That lineage marks how old the underlying cause of action is — a descendant of the common-law suit to recover land — even though it now operates inside a modern notice-pleading system.