Notes - Burdens of Proof - page 216

extensive access to these projects. In addition to attending the meetings of the
working group itself, I was an in-house consultant/intern for six months at the
Conseil supérieur du notariat , the head body of the profession, and twice traveled for
weeklong site visits to the Service central d'état civil and the Alsace-Moselle land
registry. In each case, I interviewed key administrative personnel, clerks, public
officers, and engineers, as well as observed their ordinary interactions with the
various electronic technologies deployed in their workplace.
13. Sellen and Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office, , 186.
14. A particularly eloquent articulation of this putative sublimity is Gordon Bell
and Jim Gemmell, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything
(New York: Dutton, 2009). For a critique, see Jean-François Blanchette, “The Noise
in the Archive: Oblivion in the Age of Total Recall,” in Privacy and Data Protection:
An Element of Choice , ed. Serge Gutwirth et al. (Berlin: Springer, 2011), 25-38.
15. Sellen and Harper, The Myth of the Paperless Office, , 187.
16. See Ezra N. Suleiman, Private Power and Centralization in France: The Notaires and
the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); see also Jean Rioufol and
Françoise Rico, Le notariat (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1979).
17. The question of why English common law did not develop public notaries is
often explained by arguing that customary law prevailed. Clanchy argues that the
question is more complex, reflecting “the way literate modes developed.” Clanchy,
From Memory to Written Record, England 1066-1307 , 307. In particular, “English legal
practice was probably too accustomed to seals to replace them by notarial signa .”
Nevertheless, the 1285 Statute of Merchants “came close to the essentials of notarial
practice, while avoiding the name: bonds were to be written by authorized writers,
enrolled in official registers and authenticated by a signum (in the form of a special
seal) in the writer's charge. If these rules had been enforced and extended from
money bonds to all written conveyances of property, England would have had
official writers and registries on a scale superior to any in Europe.” Ibid., 308.
18. Sénat, “Signature Électronique,” Journal Officiel des Débats no. 53 (Paris: Sénat,
February 8, 2000): 63.
19. Ibid., 45-47.
20. Catala, “Le formalisme et les nouvelles technologies,” 908.
21. See Union Internationale du Notariat Latin, Les nouvelles technologies informa-
tiques et l'acte authentique , rapport de la sous-commission, sous la présidence de Me
Gilles Rouzet (Amsterdam: Fondation pour la promotion de la Science Notariale,
2001).
22. Gilles Rouzet, “L'acte authentique à distance: Pour un aménagement du droit
français de la preuve,” in Mélanges offerts à Roland De Valkeneer: A l'occasion du