Digital Signature And Other Obsolete, Contemporary And Modern Means Of Expressing Consent In Notarial Activities

Digital signature has not been an unknown tool for most notaries for quite some time, especially in the European area. Whether it is used solely for a more efficient communication with the public registers that are used very frequently in notarial activities or even for certain types of notarial instruments, this mechanism has become as present in the life of each notary as inkpot pens used to be in the past. Within the same Latin law system, some States confer a greater legal value to such a mechanism, while other States limit its application to internal procedures. Although its degree of use is very different from one State to another, in some States (such as France) digital signature replaces holographic signature even in the authentication procedure, which is one of the most significant notarial activities. Of course, for the time being, this mechanism is only an alternative and does not exclude the possibility for the parties to continue to use the traditional means of expressing their consent. Also providing a historical overview of the way consent is externalized, this study aims to examine the extent to which digital signature is currently used by public notaries and how it has become an indispensable tool in current notarial activities. At the same time, the study also provides a perspective on extending the use of digital signature in several types of notarial procedures or even the possibility to replace digital signature with systems that identify people based on artificial intelligence, such as digital fingerprint and facial recognition