§ 9-13-140.How judicial sales advertised; description of property; advertisement and sale of livestock

Before a sheriff can sell someone’s property to satisfy a judgment, the public has to know the sale is happening. This section supplies that notice requirement. The officer publishes weekly for four weeks in the county’s legal organ — or, if the county has none, in the nearest newspaper with the largest general circulation — and the advertisement itself has to do real work: a full and complete description of the property, plus the names of the plaintiff, the defendant, and anyone found in possession of it.

For real property, the section draws a deliberate line between what the advertisement must contain and what it merely may contain. The legal description — the metes-and-bounds or lot-and-block language that identifies the parcel in the public record — is mandatory. A street address is optional, useful when it exists but not required, and the statute closes off a whole category of later challenges by stating outright that leaving the street address out, or getting it wrong, never invalidates the foreclosure. Legal descriptions, not mailing addresses, do the identifying work that matters.

Subsection (b) carves out a narrower path for horses, hogs, and cattle. Because livestock costs money to feed and house while a case works through the usual four-week advertising cycle and the first-Tuesday sale schedule, the statute lets these animals be sold at any time, but only with the defendant’s consent, and only after the officer gives the plaintiff ten days’ notice and advertises the sale at three or more public places in the county for at least ten days. Consent from the defendant is what unlocks the faster track — without it, livestock follows the same advertising rules as anything else.