Art. 2122.Appointment Or Removal of Legal Representative Not Suspended By Appeal; Effect of Vacating Appointment On Appeal

A legal representative in Louisiana practice is someone the court authorizes to act on behalf of another person who cannot act, or fully act, for themselves: a tutor for a minor, a curator for an interdict or absent person, or a succession representative administering a deceased person's estate. These roles carry ongoing responsibilities that cannot pause on their own while a lawsuit works its way through the appellate courts.

Article 2122 accounts for that reality. A judgment appointing or removing a legal representative executes provisionally even though someone has appealed it. The newly appointed tutor, curator, or succession representative can begin serving right away, and a removed representative's authority ends right away, without waiting for the appeal to run its course.

The article also protects what happens if the appellate court later disagrees and vacates the trial court's appointment. Any official act the representative performed before the appellate judgment stands. Third parties who dealt with the representative, and the estate or protected person whose affairs the representative managed, are not left to unwind everything that happened while the appeal was pending. A related but distinct rule, Article 2084, addresses when a legal representative may take an appeal on someone else's behalf; Article 2122 instead governs appeals from the judgment that appoints or removes the representative in the first place.