Spanish lawyers soon discover that they have to explain to many of their English-speaking clients the role that Spanish notarios (or civil law/Latin notaries, in general) play in ensuring legal certainty in civil law systems, why notarios must intervene in many seemingly everyday transactions and, ultimately, why they charge what they do(!).

But the opposite is also true: I’m sometimes asked about the role of notaries in the US, and I recently found an excellent answer to that question in an article that I’m sharing in a link below. Published in the Colegio Notarial de Madrid’s journal El Notario del Siglo XXI, the article entitled “¿Qué es lo que hace un ‘notary public’?” was written by José Antonio Márquez González, Mexican notario and member of the International Union of Notaries (UINL). It explains in Spanish and in detail the work of US notaries, providing sample texts in English and an extensive bibliography in the footnotes. It’s available here:

http://www.elnotario.es/practica-juridica/7317-que-es-lo-que-hace-un-notary-public