
Enforcing Monetary Judgments
Yale law professor Ian Ayres explains what happens after a plaintiff wins a money judgment in court. This is lecture 24 in his online course A Law Student's Toolkit, aimed at giving prospective and current law students a working vocabulary for legal argument. Ayres walks through the practical mechanics of collection: how a judgment creditor turns a piece of paper into actual payment, using tools such as writs of execution, liens on property, and garnishment of wages or bank accounts, and what happens when a debtor has no assets to seize. The lecture is short and conversational, in keeping with the course's format of brief modular talks paired with a reading list, and assumes no prior legal training. It sits within a broader introduction to legal reasoning rather than a specialized creditor's rights seminar, making it useful as a first orientation to how courts actually enforce their own rulings.