Payments of claims made through ignorance of the law or where all the facts are known and there is no misplaced confidence and no artifice, deception, or fraudulent practice used by the other party are deemed voluntary and cannot be recovered unless made under an urgent and immediate necessity therefor or to release person or property from detention or to prevent an immediate seizure of person or property. Filing a protest at the time of payment does not change the rule prescribed in this Code section. (Civil Code 1895, § 3723; Civil Code 1910, § 4317; Code 1933, § 20-1007.)
O.C.G.A. § 13-1-13
Recovery of voluntary payments
Applied in 4 court decisions — leading case Kemp v. American Telephone & Telegraph Co. (2004)
Most recently applied in Emory University, Inc. v. Neurocare, Inc. (January 2021)
of Code section. — This Code section is derived from the decisions in Camps v
How often courts cite this section
Court decisions citing this, by year. The dip in the last several years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so recent citations are undercounted.
Current official text: Official Code of Georgia Annotated (LexisNexis). Digitized from the Internet Archive scan of the OCGA. Reproduced from public-domain Georgia statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.