Every judgment for money rendered in this Commonwealth by any state or federal court or by confession of judgment, as provided by law, shall be a lien on all the real estate of or to which the defendant in the judgment is or becomes possessed or entitled, from the time such judgment is recorded on the judgment lien docket of the clerk's office of the county or city where such land is situated. Any judgment or decree properly docketed under the provisions of this section shall, if the real estate subject to the lien of such judgment has been annexed to or merged with an adjoining city subsequent to such docketing, be deemed to have been docketed in the proper clerk's office of such city.
Va. Code Ann. § 8.01-458
From what time judgment to be a lien on real estate; docketing revived judgment
Applied in 23 court decisions — leading case Mayer v. United States (In Re Reasonover) (1999)
Most recently applied in Didlake v. Wachovia Bank, N.A. (In Re Didlake) (June 2011)
Code 1950, § 8-386; 1954, c. 333; 1960, c. 466; 1964, c. 309; 1977, c. 617; 2021, Sp
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.
Official source: Virginia Law Portal (LIS). Reproduced from public-domain Virginia statutes; confirm against the official source for the current text. Not legal advice.