Art. 1918.Form of Final Judgment

Article 1918 sets out the formal requirements a document must meet before it counts as a valid final judgment in Louisiana. It has to be identified by language that unmistakably orders, adjudges, or decides the outcome, so a reader can tell this document is the judgment itself and not a memo about the case. It has to be signed and dated. And in its decree, the operative part that grants relief, it has to name the party who wins, the party against whom relief is awarded, and what that relief is. These are not decorative formalities: a sheriff enforcing a judgment, or a party trying to collect on one, needs a document that states plainly who owes what to whom.

When a judgment on appeal lacks that decree language, the appellate court does not dismiss the appeal or throw out the case. Instead, it remands the matter to the trial court, which then amends the judgment to supply the missing language within the time the appellate court sets. A judgment with a formal defect is fixable, but the detour costs time an appeal did not need to lose, so getting the language right the first time matters.

Paragraph B addresses a separate, common trap: when the court gives written reasons for its ruling, those reasons have to be set out in a document apart from the judgment itself, not folded into the same page. Practitioners sometimes see a document that mixes explanatory reasoning with decree-sounding language and cannot tell whether, or when, it became the signed judgment. Article 1918 heads that confusion off by keeping the two documents distinct.