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 ; provide notice of foreign drafts; 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.
The Napoleonic Code, officially the Civil Code of the French, is the French civil code established during the French Consulate period in 1804 and still in force in France, although heavily and frequently amended since its inception.
A court is any person or institution, often as a government institution, with the authority to adjudicate legal disputes between parties and carry out the administration of justice in civil, criminal, and administrative matters in accordance with the rule of law. In both common law and civil law legal systems, courts are the central means for dispute resolution, and it is generally understood that all people have an ability to bring their claims before a court. Similarly, the rights of those accused of a crime include the right to present a defense before a court.
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.
A notary is a person authorised to perform acts in legal affairs, in particular witnessing signatures on documents. The form that the notarial profession takes varies with local legal systems.
The Worshipful Company of Scriveners is an ancient Livery Company of the City of London. Originally known as the Mysterie of the Writers of the Court Letter and, since its incorporation, as the Master Wardens and Assistants of the Company of Scrivenors of the Cittie of London [sic], the Scriveners' Company remains one of the few City livery companies continuing to influence professional standards, namely that of scrivener notary. The Company received its first ordinances in 1373 and its royal charter was granted by King James I on 28 January 1617.
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). The Apostille Convention is intended to simplify the procedure through which a document, issued in one of the contracting states, can be certified for legal purposes in the other contracting states of the Convention. A certification under the Convention is called an apostille or Hague apostille. An apostille is an international certification comparable to a notarisation, and may supplement a local notarisation of the document. If the Convention applies between two states, an apostille issued by the state of origin is sufficient to certify the document, and removes the need for further certification by the destination state.
A supranational union is a type of international organization that is empowered to directly exercise some of the powers and functions otherwise reserved to states. A supranational organization involves a greater transfer of or limitation of state sovereignty than other kinds of international organizations.
Civil law is a legal system originating in Italy and France and adopted in much of the world. The civil law system is intellectualized within the framework of Roman law and French civil law, and with core principles codified into a referable system, which serves as the primary source of law. The civil law system is often contrasted with the common law system, which originated in medieval England. Whereas the civil law takes the form of legal codes, the common law comes from uncodified case law that arises as a result of judicial decisions, recognising prior court decisions as legally binding precedent.
A code of law, also called a law code or legal code, is a systematic collection of statutes. It is a type of legislation that purports to exhaustively cover a complete system of laws or a particular area of law as it existed at the time the code was enacted, by a process of codification. Though the process and motivations for codification are similar in different common law and civil law systems, their usage is different.
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.
Sources of law are the origins of laws, the binding rules that enable any state to govern its territory.
Africa's fifty-six sovereign states range widely in their history and structure, and their laws are variously defined by customary law, religious law, common law, Western civil law, other legal traditions, and combinations thereof.
The European civil code (ECC) is a proposed harmonisation of private law across the European Union.
The legal system of Ukraine is based on civil law, and belongs to the Romano-Germanic legal tradition. The main source of legal information is codified law. Customary law and case law are not as common, though case law is often used in support of the written law, as in many other legal systems. Historically, the Ukrainian legal system is primarily influenced by the French civil code, Roman Law, and traditional Ukrainian customary law. The new civil law books were heavily influenced by the German Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch.
Law is a set of rules that are created and are enforceable by social or governmental institutions to regulate behavior, with its precise definition a matter of longstanding debate. It has been variously described as a science and as the art of justice. State-enforced laws can be made by a group legislature or by a single legislator, resulting in statutes; by the executive through decrees and regulations; or established by judges through precedent, usually in common law jurisdictions. Private individuals may create legally binding contracts, including arbitration agreements that adopt alternative ways of resolving disputes to standard court litigation. The creation of laws themselves may be influenced by a constitution, written or tacit, and the rights encoded therein. The law shapes politics, economics, history and society in various ways and also serves as a mediator of relations between people.
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.
The law of Sweden is a civil law system, whose essence is manifested in its dependence on statutory law. Sweden's civil law tradition, as in the rest of Europe, is founded upon Roman law as codified in the Corpus Juris Civilis, but as developed within German law, rather than upon the Napoleonic Code. But, over time Sweden along with the other Scandinavian countries have deviated significantly from their classical Roman and German models. Instead, the Scandinavian countries together with Finland, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Åland (self-governing) and Iceland may be said to have a special "Nordic" version of jurisprudence that is neither a truly civil law system nor a part of the British-derived common law legal system.
The Council of the Notariats of the European Union (CNUE) is a nonprofit organisation of notaries from 22 European countries. The CNUE is the official body representing the notariat in dealings with the institutions of the European Union. Speaking for the profession, it expresses the joint decisions of its members to the European Union.
In the United States, a notary public is a person appointed by a state government, e.g., the governor, lieutenant governor, secretary of state, 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 have a commission there as well.
