The place of the public notary: How the engine of the capitalist state operates through material and legal arrangements

Abstract

This article explores the institution of the public notary in Colombia as an important place for legality where we can appreciate different mechanisms through which law is productive of space and space shapes understandings of the legitimacy of law. I study the notary as a material and social space of interactions between persons (parties, lawyers and public officials), non-human actors (seals, signatures, fingerprints) and practices (solemn oaths, making of deeds). I highlight three aspects. First, at the notary the relationship between the private and public orders is enacted. Private actions (birth, marriage or sell of property) once notarized through the stamping of the seal are now public acts. Second, contrary to think of the notary as space empty of law since it does not solve any legal controversies, I argue that particular legal knowledge practices at the notary consolidate processes of individuation and reification essential for the making of both, persons (criticizes) and things (property); these practices are also key in the making of the state’s authority. Finally, I review the relationship between the notary and the instrument (the sealed document) to reveal the importance of certain ideas such as “public faith”. These ideas allow the notary to detach him/herself from the agency of the instrument; however, inherent indeterminacies remain in these configurations that reveal the temporal and variable character of the reality the notary attest to. This is important because when we partake in the formalization regimes happening at these places, we implicitly accept and maintain some of these cognitive constructions that constitute important pillars for both, the market and the state.