Art. 1919.Judgment Affecting Immovable Property; Particular Description

Immovable property is Louisiana's civil-law term for what most other states call real property or real estate: land, buildings, and things permanently attached to the ground. Article 1919 requires any final judgment that affects title to immovable property, deciding who owns it or what rights someone has in it, to describe the property with particularity rather than in loose or general terms.

Particularity matters because a judgment affecting title typically gets recorded in the public land records of the parish where the property sits, so that later buyers, lenders, and title searchers can find it and know exactly which parcel it touches. That calls for the kind of detail found in a deed, not a bare street address or a general reference to a piece of land. A judgment that fails to describe the property clearly can be difficult to record properly, and can leave title to the property clouded or disputed.

The article carves out one exception: judgments in succession proceedings that recognize a deceased person's heirs or legatees and send them into possession of the estate. Those judgments address a person's status as heir or legatee, and the succession as a whole, rather than pinpointing individual parcels, so Article 1919's particularity requirement does not apply to them.