A notary public of the common law is a public officer constituted by law to serve the public in non-contentious matters usually concerned with general financial transactions, estates, deeds, powers-of-attorney, and foreign and international business. A notary's main functions are to validate the signature of a person ; administer oaths and affirmations; take affidavits and statutory declarations, including from witnesses; authenticate the execution of certain classes of documents; take acknowledgments ; protest notes and bills of exchange; provide notice of foreign drafts; prepare marine or ship's protests in cases of damage; provide exemplifications and notarial copies; and, to perform certain other official acts depending on the jurisdiction. Such transactions are known as notarial acts, or more commonly, notarizations. The term notary public only refers to common-law notaries and should not be confused with civil-law notaries.
Authentication is the act of proving an assertion, such as the identity of a computer system user. In contrast with identification, the act of indicating a person or thing's identity, authentication is the process of verifying that identity. It might involve validating personal identity documents, verifying the authenticity of a website with a digital certificate, determining the age of an artifact by carbon dating, or ensuring that a product or document is not counterfeit.
A digital signature is a mathematical scheme for verifying the authenticity of digital messages or documents. A valid digital signature, where the prerequisites are satisfied, gives a recipient very high confidence that the message was created by a known sender (authenticity), and that the message was not altered in transit (integrity).
A public key infrastructure (PKI) is a set of roles, policies, hardware, software and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The purpose of a PKI is to facilitate the secure electronic transfer of information for a range of network activities such as e-commerce, internet banking and confidential email. It is required for activities where simple passwords are an inadequate authentication method and more rigorous proof is required to confirm the identity of the parties involved in the communication and to validate the information being transferred.
Civil-law notaries, or Latin notaries, are lawyers of noncontentious private civil law who draft, take, and record legal instruments for private parties, provide legal advice and give attendance in person, and are vested as public officers with the authentication power of the State. As opposed to most notaries public, their common-law counterparts, civil-law notaries are highly trained, licensed practitioners providing a full range of regulated legal services, and whereas they hold a public office, they nonetheless operate usually—but not always—in private practice and are paid on a fee-for-service basis. They often receive generally the same education as attorneys at civil law with further specialized education but without qualifications in advocacy, procedural law, or the law of evidence, somewhat comparable to solicitor training in certain common-law countries.
Legal instrument is a legal term of art that is used for any formally executed written document that can be formally attributed to its author, records and formally expresses a legally enforceable act, process, or contractual duty, obligation, or right, and therefore evidences that act, process, or agreement. Examples include a certificate, deed, bond, contract, will, legislative act, notarial act, court writ or process, or any law passed by a competent legislative body in municipal (domestic) or international law. Many legal instruments were written under seal by affixing a wax or paper seal to the document in evidence of its legal execution and authenticity. However, today many jurisdictions have done away with the requirement of documents being under seal in order to give them legal effect.
In cryptography, a certificate authority or certification authority (CA) is an entity that stores, signs, and issues digital certificates. A digital certificate certifies the ownership of a public key by the named subject of the certificate. This allows others to rely upon signatures or on assertions made about the private key that corresponds to the certified public key. A CA acts as a trusted third party—trusted both by the subject (owner) of the certificate and by the party relying upon the certificate. The format of these certificates is specified by the X.509 or EMV standard.
The Convention of 5 October 1961 Abolishing the Requirement of Legalisation for Foreign Public Documents, also known as the Apostille Convention, is an international treaty drafted by the Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH). It is intended to simplify the procedure through which a document, issued in one of the contracting states, can be certified for legal purposes in all the other contracting states. A certification under the convention is called an apostille or Hague apostille. It is an international certification comparable to a notarisation, and may supplement a local notarisation of the document. If the convention applies between two countries, an apostille issued by the country of origin is sufficient to certify the document, and removes the need for further certification by the destination country.
A certified copy is a copy of a primary document that has on it an endorsement or certificate that it is a true copy of the primary document. It does not certify that the primary document is genuine, only that it is a true copy of the primary document.
An eschatocol, or closing protocol, is the final section of a legal or public document, which may include a formulaic sentence of appreciation; the attestation of those responsible for the document, which may be the author, writer, countersigner, principal parties involved, and witnesses to the enactment or the subscription; or both. It also expresses the context of the documentation of the action described therein, i. e., enunciation of the means of validation and indication of who is responsible to document the act; and the final formulae.
A Commissioner of Deeds is an officer having authority to take affidavits, depositions, acknowledgments of deeds, etc., for use in the state by which the person is appointed. The office is similar to that of Notaries Public; thus, commissioners of deeds generally authenticate their acts with some type of official seal.
Notaries public in New York are commissioned by the Secretary of State of New York after passing a short examination in law and procedure and submitting an application for appointment accompanied by the proper fees. A notary's commission is received from and kept on file with the county clerk of the county in which they reside or do business, but notaries are empowered to actually perform their duties anywhere in the state.
In the law of the United States of America, an objection is a formal protest raised in court during a trial to disallow a witness's testimony or other evidence in violation of the rules of evidence or other procedural law. An objection is typically raised after the opposing party asks a question of the witness, but before the witness can answer, or when the opposing party is about to enter something into evidence. The judge then makes a ruling on whether the objection is "sustained" or "overruled". An attorney may choose to "rephrase" a question that has been objected to, so long as the judge permits it. Lawyers should make an objection before there is an answer to the question.
A certified translation is one which fulfills the requirements in the country in question, enabling it to be used in formal procedures, with the translator accepting responsibility for its accuracy. These requirements vary widely from country to country. While some countries allow only state-appointed translators to produce such translations, others will accept those carried out by any competent bilingual individual. Between these two extremes are countries where a certified translation can be carried out by any professional translator with the correct credentials.
In the U.S. state of Florida, a notary public is a public officer appointed by the governor of the state to take acknowledgments, administer oaths, attest to photocopies of certain documents, solemnize marriage, protest the non-acceptance or non-payment of negotiable instruments, and perform other duties specified by law.
A public instrument is any legal instrument recorded with and authenticated by a public office or employee. To carry weight, any such instrument, must be genuine and authentic. Public instruments consequently must bear the name, title, and seal of the official that issued them, and should be written in the presence of witnesses who attested to them.
An act is an instrument that records a fact or something that has been said, done, or agreed. Acts generally take the form of legal instruments of writing that have probative value and executory force. They are usually accepted as self-authenticating demonstrative evidence in court proceedings, though with the precarious status of notaries public and their acts under common law, this is not always so.
In the United States, a notary public is a person appointed by a state government, e.g., the governor, lieutenant governor, state secretary, or in some cases the state legislature, and whose primary role is to serve the public as an impartial witness when important documents are signed. Since the notary is a state officer, a notary's duties may vary widely from state to state and in most cases, a notary is barred from acting outside his or her home state unless they also have a commission there as well.
eIDAS is an EU regulation on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the European Single Market. It was established in EU Regulation 910/2014 of 23 July 2014 on electronic identification and repeals 1999/93/EC from 13 December 1999.
A notarial act is any written narration of facts (recitals) drawn up by a notary, notary public or civil-law notary authenticated by the notary's signature and official seal and detailing a procedure which has been transacted by or before the notary in their official capacity. A notarial act is the only lawful means of proving those facts of which it is the recognized record, whereas on other matters it is usually inadmissible, because, being beyond the powers entrusted to the notary by law, it is non-official. In most common-law countries, multiple-page acts are bound together using a sewn or knotted ribbon, the ends of which are secured by a wafer impressed with the notary's seal. This is called annexing or annexure.
