§ 9-12-138.Judgments to which article applies

Code Section 9-12-131 defines “foreign judgment” broadly — any judgment, decree, or order entitled to full faith and credit in Georgia. Read alone, that definition would let a creditor use Article 6’s filing shortcut for a judgment from any court whose rulings Georgia must respect. This section narrows that reach for the filing procedure itself: Article 6 applies to foreign judgments of other states only when the rendering state has adopted its own version of the Uniform Enforcement of Foreign Judgments Act, in substantially the same form Georgia adopted here.

The limitation works as a condition on reciprocity rather than a loophole for debtors. The uniform act functions because participating states agreed to treat each other’s filed judgments the same way; a state that never adopted a matching version has not made that commitment, and extending Georgia’s fast-lane filing procedure to that state’s judgments one-sidedly would give up the reciprocal bargain the act depends on.

Narrowing the filing procedure this way does not strand a creditor holding a judgment from a non-adopting jurisdiction. That creditor still has the older path available: a fresh lawsuit suing on the judgment as its own debt, an option Code Section 9-12-136 keeps open regardless of where the judgment came from. This section only decides which judgments qualify for the streamlined filing route, not which judgments Georgia will ultimately enforce.