Art. 1843.Default Judgment

Every defendant served with a Louisiana lawsuit has a set window to respond. Article 1843 names what happens on the other side of that window: if the defendant lets the time to plead run out, the judgment a court can render against that defendant is a default judgment. The article's job is definitional. It tells the reader what the term means within Title VI's catalog of judgment types, and it leaves the procedure for obtaining and confirming a default judgment -- the preliminary default, the proof required, the notice owed to the defendant -- to other parts of the Code.

Read alongside Article 1841, a confirmed default judgment is a final judgment: it decides the merits of the plaintiff's claim, even though the defendant never appeared to contest it. That is what gives a default judgment its force -- once confirmed, it carries the same weight as a judgment reached after a fully litigated trial.

The stakes for a defendant are real. Ignoring a lawsuit does not make it go away; it opens the door to a judgment entered without that defendant's side of the story ever being heard. Article 1843 is the provision that names that outcome and ties it to a single trigger: failing to plead within the time the law prescribes.