§ 9-12-130.Short title

Every article in Georgia’s Code needs a name lawyers can point to, and this section supplies it for Article 6 of Chapter 12: the “Uniform Enforcement of Foreign Judgments Law.” The label carries a signal of its own — this article did not come from Georgia’s own drafting table. It comes from a model act written so that states could adopt matching versions, so a judgment creditor moving between states finds the same basic procedure waiting.

What follows in this article is a shortcut. Without it, a person holding a judgment from another state’s court, or from a federal court, generally has to file a fresh lawsuit in Georgia — treating the earlier judgment as the debt owed and asking a Georgia court to enter its own judgment on it. Article 6 offers a faster route instead: filing the earlier judgment directly with a Georgia clerk, who then treats it much like a judgment Georgia’s own court entered. The rest of the article — the definition of a covered judgment, the filing mechanics, notice to the debtor, and the grounds for staying enforcement — builds out that shortcut.

Georgia enacted this article in 1986, and the short title has held steady since, even as the surrounding Code sections around it picked up small technical amendments over the years.