Art. 1732.Limitation Upon Jury Trials

Where Article 1731 recognizes the right to a jury, Article 1732 spends most of its length taking that right away for specific categories of cases. The largest carve-out covers smaller claims: if no individual petitioner's cause of action exceeds ten thousand dollars, exclusive of interest and costs, there is no jury. The article then builds in timing rules around that threshold. A petitioner who stipulates, sixty days or more before trial, that the claim does not exceed ten thousand dollars strips the defendant of a jury too. A stipulation made later, less than sixty days before trial, leaves other parties free to keep their own jury right if they already qualify and have followed the procedural steps for obtaining one.

A second carve-out applies to suits filed in parish or city courts within those courts' own jurisdictional dollar limits, again where the petitioner stipulates the claim fits under that ceiling — except this carve-out does not reach delictual or quasi-delictual claims, which are instead governed by the general ten-thousand-dollar rule. A third carve-out removes jury trial from suits on an unconditional obligation to pay a fixed sum of money, unless the defense raised is forgery, fraud, error, or want or failure of consideration.

The rest of the article lists proceeding types that never go to a jury regardless of amount in dispute: summary, executory, probate, partition, mandamus, habeas corpus, quo warranto, injunction, concursus, workers' compensation, emancipation, tutorship, interdiction, curatorship, filiation, annulment of marriage, and divorce proceedings, along with custody, visitation, alimony, and child support matters, review of administrative or municipal action, and any case where a jury trial is denied by some other law.