subject: Electronic Signature Law in Real Estate: A Transient History [print this page] Electronic Signature Law in Real Estate: A Transient History
Samuel Morse sent America's 1st telegram in 1838, heralding the occasion with the words, "A patient waiter is not any loser." By the late 1860s, a mere 30 years later, the telegraph had replaced the Pony Specific, was in established use for business transactions, and had been accepted by the courts as a valid suggests that for making enforceable contracts.
After all, the telegraph is kind of like an electric pen, and an electrical pen is quite like an ecclesiastical seal, which is not far from Moses descending Mount Sinai with the decalogue written in stone. At every amount in human history, we've deployed the technology available to us to memorialize vital covenants in durable media for the purpose of making reliable records of what occurred.
In those respects, the internet is not any totally different from past media and therefore the courts and legislatures have recognized that. As a curiosity, Silicon Valley's beginnings will be traced back to 1909 and the founding of the Federal Telegraph Company that was funded by Stanford's president at the time and many faculty members as angel investors. Additional on point, Congress enacted the Electronic Signatures in World and National Commerce Act (conveniently, ESIGN) in 2000 whose main import was to declare electronic records and signatures akin to the pen and paper. Most states have passed the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, a model state law that also declares the electronic pen and ink pen as equivalents.
Commentators have found out, not for the primary time, that federal and state legislatures acted too eagerly and wasted their efforts. Lawrence Lessig, in 1995, argued that the law of cyberspace should be developed through the common law, which is the method by which judges make case-by-case selections drawing from past precedent. Like the telegraph, the courts were already reasoning by analogy that records might be created and signed on the internet. All they'd to try and do was look to the telegraph! In fact, Mr. Jose Arroyo in Florida executed the first paperless home mortgage in 2000, before ESIGN had become law. The loan was closed and recorded in less than five hours down from the average of forty-five days it usually took.
Electronic signatures are currently well-established as valid. The increase of electronic signatures mirrors the rise of the internet as B2B and B2C industrial transactions would be not possible while not the legal foundation of the validity of electronic transactions. (Although, the, say, online mortgage space wasn't doing that nice for awhile.) Nevertheless, the electronic signature is simply a chapter within the long history of the writing and therefore the signature.
