Art. 5001.Appeals From City and Parish Courts

Chapter 3 turns from justice of the peace courts back to the parish and city courts covered in Chapter 1 of this Title, and picks up where that chapter's judgments leave off. Article 5001 sends an appeal from a parish or city court judgment to the court of appeal, the same body that hears appeals from the district court.

The manner of appeal matches district court practice as well: the appeal proceeds on the record, meaning the court of appeal reviews what happened below rather than starting the case over, and it is taken in the same manner as an appeal from a district court judgment. That review process is covered at length elsewhere on this site, in Book III's treatment of proceedings in the courts of appeal, and Article 5001 does not depart from it.

This puts parish and city court appeals on notably different footing from the justice of the peace court appeals covered in Chapter 2. There, Article 4924 sends the case to the parish or district court for an entirely new trial, with no further ordinary appeal available afterward. Here, the case goes straight to the court of appeal for the same kind of record review a district court litigant would get, preserving the appellate structure that governs Louisiana civil cases generally.