Talk:Legal instrument

message: Is a Contract of Employment or a Collective Bargaining Agreement a Legal Instrument - like a Will or Act ot Parliament or Deed?
Yes. Though the sense of the phrase doesn't usually include Statutes, I suppose it can. In developed countries unions often negotiate employment contracts with employers, which may be later taken to court for enforcement in case of disputes. ww 18:32, 4 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Untitled

message: User:Flibjib8 has twice added this passage:
:Based on their formality, authority, and degree of authenticity, legal instruments can be classified into four categories:
**Instruments under hand - validated by signature of author"Law Glossary", op. cit., s.v. "instrument under hand", retrieved on 20 May 2009: . 
***simple contract, affidavit, promissory note 
**Instruments under seal - validated by seal (and often signature) of author"Law Glossary", op. cit., s.v. "instrument under hand", retrieved on 20 May 2009: . 
***covenants, corporate contracts, certificates, letters of authentication, lawyer's writings 
**Instruments in solemn form or deeds - validated by signature of author and attesting witnesses 
***bonds, wills, conveyances, mortgages, diplomas, powers of attorney, patents, contracts by deed 
**Public instruments - validated by signature of author and attesting witnesses and recorded with a public office or employee and bears their seal 
***notarial acts, court orders, legislative acts, statutory instruments, vital records
The first time, it had no sources. When a  tag did not elicit any sources I deleted it. Now it is back, with a self-published source from someone named Kevin Boone, who describes himself as a "scientist, engineer, and educator". This source does not come close to meeting the requirements at Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Reliable sources.
In addition, I dispute the correctness of the passage. First, these are not good categories because many of them overlap. Second, the claim that deeds are validated by attesting witnesses is false for many states in the U.S. --Jc3s5h (talk) 18:47, 20 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Type

message: Re: First paragraph in section entitled: "Electronic legal documents"
The statement: To prevent tampering or unauthorized changes to the original document, encryption is used. is not strictly true.  Encryption does not necessarily prevent tampering or unauthorized changes, nor does it make any such alteration detectable. What I believe you are referring to is the process of digital signing, wherein an asymmetric mathematical function is applied to the message which cannot easily be forged without knowledge of the private key material belonging to the message signer.  In this process the message itself is usually delivered in clear-text and so is not encrypted.
If only a shared key algorithm is required to verify the signed document then by the very nature of shared key algorithms a forged document may be created by the recipient and does not therefore prove any authenticity of the message to the sender or any observer should that be required (c.f. all parties having the same wax seals).
RSA, a popular asymmetric encryption algorithm, (and other similarly algorithms), may be used to digitally sign a document by "encrypting" small chunks of the message serially (or by applying a digest algorithm to the message, signing it and delivering both the signed digest and the message to the recipient).  Here the term encryption is perhaps misleading as, for RSA, one has a private key and a public key; the public key is by design to be a well distributed key; the private key is intended to be known only to its owner. The signing algorithm makes use of the private key whereas the verification step makes use of its public counterpart.  Therefore, the "encrypted" message is more like an encoded message where any recipient should be able to derive the message contents using the generally available public key, but will not easily be able to generate a new signature for a forged message that will later verify with the original public key.
The strength of a digital signature depends on the security of the private key (which the signer will have a vested interest in assuring), the strength of the message digest (if used -- some messages may be constructed such that the digest of two different messages are identical -- see birthday attacks), and the computational difficulty of calculating the private key given data such as the public key itself.
--Nimpo (talk) 15:37, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: I suspect the editor who wrote that was simplifying the situation; some digital signatures make alterations detectable, and some digital signatures accomplish their goal of making tampering evident through the use of asymmetric encryption. That sentence really should be reworded, but given the many conflicting definitions of basic terms, it isn't easy. Jc3s5h (talk) 16:58, 21 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Encryption vs Digital Signature