- published: 22 May 2015
- views: 10124
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.
Common types of acts are legislative, judicial, and notarial acts.
Legislative acts (fully, acts of statute), or more commonly statutes, are the cornerstone of statutory and regulatory law. They may include in a monarchical system any royal edict, proclamation, or decree setting forth or establishing law as it affects all citizens. In parliamentary or congressional systems, acts passed by a legislature are known as acts of Parliament or acts of Congress.
A notarial act (or notarial instrument or notarial writing) is any written narration of facts (recitals) drawn up by a notary public or civil-law notary authenticated by his signature and official seal and detailing a procedure which has been transacted by or before him in his 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 (referred to as silk), the ends of which are secured by a wafer impressed with the notary's seal. This is called annexing or annexure.
Act or ACT may mean:
Acts may mean:
A document is a written, drawn, presented or recorded representation of thoughts. Originating from the Latin Documentum meaning lesson - the verb doceō means to teach, and is pronounced similarly, in the past it was usually used as a term for a written proof used as evidence. In the computer age, a document is usually used to describe a primarily textual file, along with its structure and design, such as fonts, colors and additional images.
The modern term 'document' can no longer be defined by its transmission medium (such as paper), following the existence of electronic documents. 'Documentation' has more meanings than a written or drawn presentation of thoughts.
The formal term 'document' is defined in Library and information science and in documentation science, as a basic theoretical construct. It is everything which may be preserved or represented in order to serve as evidence for some purpose. The classical example provided by Suzanne Briet is an antelope: "An antelope running wild on the plains of Africa should not be considered a document, she rules. But if it were to be captured, taken to a zoo and made an object of study, it has been made into a document. It has become physical evidence being used by those who study it. Indeed, scholarly articles written about the antelope are secondary documents, since the antelope itself is the primary document." (Quoted from Buckland, 1998 ). (This view has been seen as an early expression of what now is known as actor–network theory).