France (FR) — civil law.
Nothing on this page describes United States or Argentine practice.
La carte judiciaire
The juge de l'exécution competent for a saisie immobilière is the one whose
court covers the place the property is (CPCE art. R311-2). To use that
rule you need the map, and the map is published.
The numbers
Counted from the official liste des juridictions compétentes pour les communes de France (data.gouv.fr, licence LOv2, edition of July 2026):
| Level | Count |
|---|---|
| Communes mapped | 35 029 |
| First-instance courts | 168 — 164 tribunaux judiciaires plus 4 tribunaux de première instance (Nouméa, Papeete, Mata-Utu, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon) |
Cours d'appel | 37 |
The trap: ressorts cross départements
A département is an administrative unit. A ressort is a judicial one. They
mostly coincide, and then they do not. Exactly five first-instance courts
cover communes in more than one département:
| Court | Départements covered |
|---|---|
| Tribunal judiciaire de Colmar | 67, 68 |
| Tribunal judiciaire de Saint-Malo | 22, 35 |
| Tribunal judiciaire de Basse-Terre | 971, 977, 978 |
| Tribunal judiciaire de Saint-Denis-de-La-Réunion | 974, 984 |
| Tribunal de Première Instance de Papeete | 987, 989 |
The overseas three are the interesting ones: Basse-Terre’s ressort reaches Saint-Barthélemy and Saint-Martin, which are separate collectivities.
Correction — the court is not always the property’s court
An earlier draft of this wiki said the forum for a French auction is always
territorial. That is true of saisie immobilière (art. R311-2) and not
true of every judicial auction.
Observed on Licitor, 2026-08-22 — the hearing of the Tribunal judiciaire de Versailles of Wednesday 2 September 2026 lists five lots, of which only one (Houilles) is in that court’s ressort. The others are in Paris 11ème, Paris 17ème/18ème and Saint-Denis — départements 75 and 93, well outside Yvelines.
The explanation is that R311-2 fixes competence for a saisie. Other routes to
an auction do not follow it: a licitation ending an indivision after a
succession or a divorce is heard by the court seized of that case, and a
vente sur adjudication volontaire is not a forced sale at all. Those
courts then sell property wherever it happens to be.
needs_verification: the precise competence rule for licitation-partage, and
whether Licitor labels the sale type in a way that can be parsed.
Never infer a property's location from the court
On this evidence the inference fails for a material share of listings. Read the location from the listing, not from the tribunal.
Consequence for modelling
A dataset cannot make the court a child of the département — five rows would have two parents. The two hierarchies must be kept as separate axes:
- Attach an auction to the département the property is in — stated on every listing, and what a buyer searches by.
- Keep the court as an attribute of the auction, not as its position in a geographic tree.
The correction above strengthens this rather than weakening it: since the court can sit in a different département from the property, a model that placed auctions by court would misplace them outright.
That is the choice made in the auction index built on this wiki.