§ 5401.Definition.

Article 54 exists because the U.S. Constitution's Full Faith and Credit Clause requires New York courts to honor money judgments entered by courts of other states and by federal courts, but honoring a judgment and enforcing it through New York's own collection machinery are different problems. CPLR 5401 sets the boundary for which judgments qualify for Article 54's streamlined filing procedure: any judgment, decree, or order of a United States court, state or federal, that's entitled to full faith and credit here.

Two categories fall outside that definition. A judgment obtained by default in appearance doesn't qualify, and neither does one obtained by confession of judgment. Both exclusions share a rationale: Article 54's procedure lets a creditor domesticate a sister-state judgment with comparatively little judicial oversight, and the legislature reserved that streamlined path for judgments that went through a genuine adversarial process in the rendering court, rather than ones entered without the debtor's active participation.

Because the definition is tied to full faith and credit, it doesn't extend to judgments from foreign countries; those aren't entitled to full faith and credit under the Constitution and have to be recognized, if at all, through New York's separate law on foreign country money judgments.