Art. 41.Definition

Article 41 does one job: it tells you what the word "venue" means for the rest of the Code. Venue is the parish where a case may properly be brought and tried. In Louisiana, the parish is the trial-court geographic unit that other states call a county, so asking "what is the proper venue" is the same as asking "which parish's district court gets this case."

Venue is not the same question as jurisdiction. Jurisdiction asks whether a court has the power to hear a type of case or bind a particular defendant at all. Venue assumes a court has that power and asks only which of Louisiana's parishes is the right one, geographically, to hear this case. A court can have jurisdiction over a dispute and still be the wrong venue for it.

Article 41 does not say which parish is proper for any given case — that work falls to the articles that follow: the general domicile-based rule in Article 42, the long list of exceptions for particular kinds of actions in Articles 71 through 86, and the rules on waiver and transfer that close out the chapter. Article 41 supplies the term; the rest of the chapter supplies the answer.