If Bob did not see an ad from Don and Dan, and if Don and Dan are not scammers in league with Bob, then Bob had no way of knowing Don and Dan bought the car. Moreover, he’d have had to mock up an ad from Don and Dan offering the car for sale – impossible if he he didn’t know to put them in the ad.
Whereas in the US, a notary is basically a professional witness; someone who can officially affirm that a particular document was signed in their presence. I don’t think it takes any complicated training, although @pulykamell is better qualified to speak to that.
Interestingly, some states in the South used to have laws that required notaries to affirm a belief in God; until the ACLU and atheist groups challenged them under the First Amendment.
In Illinois, no training was required to become a notary. I became one because my job needed someone as a registered notary on hand. Once a month or so is about as often as I needed to notarize something. I did get to buy myself a cool stamp, though.
It’s funny that within a few days I’ve been asked twice, in different threads, to contribute something about the role of notaries in civil law jurisdictions, so I’m using this opportunity to link to my post in the other thread. @Slow_Moving_Vehicle and @Pardel-Lux are right: In the civil law, notary is a highly prestigious and lucrative job which only fully qualified lawyers are admitted to, and even those typically compete for one of the rare, much-coveted positions. Whereas in common law countries, as I understand it, notaries public don’t have legal training and are limited to confirming the authenticity of signatures or copes and the like.
I might add, on top of my response in the other thread, that laws vary among civil law jurisdictions as to whether you can be a pure notary who does nothing else, or whether you can combine being a notary with being an attorney. Even among the states of Germany, rules differ in this regard (although in states where you can be both at the same time, you’re not allowed to notarise a transaction in which you have acted as an attorney; that would be a conflict of interest).
Oh, and fun fact: Columbus brought a notary, named Rodrigo de Escobedo, with him on the Santa María. His job was to write and authenticate the documents with which the Spanish crown (under its own law) claimed title to the islands.
Pretty much.
I personally don’t know anyone who is a full-time notary public here in Illinois. All the notaries I know became notaries as part of a job requirement or need. I’m sure some notaries do nothing but notarizing, but my experience is it’s just a legal designation you have. And, like I said, here in Illinois you can only charge a max of $1 to notarize a signature, so not something I’d make a career of as a freelancer.(Though I understand there are other services you can charge a bit more for.)
Can you clarify what you meant:
- To become a notary, a person had to affirm a belief in God.
- To affirm a belief in God, you were required to use a notary.
The whole matter raises questions from a conflict of law perspective, incidentally. Many provisions in civil law countries require notarisation for certain types of transactions (such as land conveyance or corporate law resolutions), and since the notary’s fees are a percentage of the volume of the transaction, that can be quite expensive if a lot of money is at stake. Some parties have therefore had the idea of saving money by getting their document notarised in a jurisdiction where it’s much cheaper. Of course, in that case you won’t get the independent legal advice that the notary is supposed to give, but to save money you may well decide to take that risk, especially if the transaction is between large companies that have entire in-house legal departments at their disposal to review the document beforehand. In such cases, the home jurisdiction will be faced with the question whether to recognise the foreign notarisation.
And I think it is funny that I, within the same couple of days, have learned that such simple words as government and notary are not evident to translate at all, as you and @Cervaise have shown me. Thanks for that! (Says a professional interpreter, who will henceforth lose a couple of precious seconds thinking about what context to apply, European or American, when he hears those words again. It’s a hard life!)
To be commissioned as a notary, some states - among them, Maryland - required that the applicant affirm a belief in the existence of God. A man named Roy Torcaso, who was denied a commission when he refused to do so, sued the state of Maryland. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court in 1961, who unanimously ruled in his favor. Torcaso v. Watkins declared all religious tests for public office to be unconstitutional.
Is it clear that Bob knows the name of the buyer?
It was said tangentially in the OP, but it isn’t clear that Bob actually knows Dan and Don bought it.
As an aside on this: Contrary to the wider meaning of the word “government” in America (compared to Europe), Americans use a narrower meaning of “administration”. In America, it seems to be widely used in the meaning of a President’s term of office (as in “the Biden administration”). In Europe, it can refer to the entire bureaucratic apparatus of ministries, government departments and agencies that run a country.
rereading the OP, I see the error of my ways and would like to retract all of my statements in this thread
On the other hand, if I heard the phrase “The government fell!”, referring to my country of America, I would assume something like a coup or the disintegration of civil authority. Whereas if I heard about it in a context of a parliamentary government, it could also mean that, but I would assume at first that it meant that the governing coalition fractured and/or there was a no-confidence vote passed.
I’m mistaken and wish to withdraw my statements
Most graciously conceded, kind Sigene. Let us speak nevermore about it.
Many US lawyers used to be notaries, maybe still are. It was an additional service lawyers could offer but a modern law office with multiple attorneys wouldn’t need all of them to be notarized and I expect they usually have a legal secretary or other personnel to do that. Their clients may have to put up with ridiculous hours billed for legal work but they’d likely balk at paying $225 for a 5 minute hour to notarize a document. These days I know several notaries personally and as mentioned above any bank probably has one.
I have been reading an [amusing] account of a house purchase in Spain, from not too long ago.
Old properties in Spain are often owned by a number of relatives and this makes the transaction complicated. One thing they are all united about though is the need to reduce tax on the sale to the minimum.
Everyone meets at the Notary’s office and documents are examined and signed. The Notary ostentatiously leaves for a few moments while an envelope of cash is handed over. As far as the government is concerned the house changed hands for half its value.
Quite common in Germany too. There’s a land transfer tax which applies each time a real estate property changes hand; the tax is a (hefty, something around 5 %) percentage of the purchase price. So a common scheme is to put a purchase price that’s lower than the actually agreed amount into the notarised deed, and pay the difference in cash.
Of course there’s a risk attached to that for the buyer (other than the risk of being caught in something illegal): If the buyer wants to rescind the contract and reclaim the purchase price, the seller might repay only the lower amount in the contract and deny the existence of the extra payment.
I think a lot of posts in this thread are still not recognizing that Amy’s car and Don and Dan’s car may not be the same car. Just because Bob assumes it is the same car, it may be the same year/make/model/color but that doesn’t mean it’s the same car unless there is a VIN or something that matches. Don and Dan could have bought Amy’s car for parts to fix up a 150,000 mile car that looked the same.