Digital signatures are interesting, because they are mathematical objects which must achieve legal effects. As such, they must meet the standards of two very distinct cultures of proof, the mathematical and legal. My doctoral research was grounded at a particularly interesting meeting point of these two cultures of proof: a working group set up by the French Ministry of justice to draft a decree on "electronic authentic acts," a decree required by the introduction of electronic signatures into the French Civil Code on March 13, 2000 (a process itself initiated by the 1999 European Directive on Electronic Signatures). As the legal instruments occupying the highest rung in the French evidence hierarchy, authentic acts (i.e., notarized acts, court decisions, and records of civil status) constitute the centuries-old written foundation of the French legal system. The working group was thus the occasion for two systems of authenticity to come to grips and settle their differences: one based on socially trusted third parties, i.e., public officers; the other based on the mathematics and technologies of cryptography. The members of the working group were thus mandated with the task of imagining the theater of litigation involving such electronic written evidence defining the role judges, plaintiffs, defendants, public officers, experts, and the technologies themselves would play, and ascribing them their respective burden of proofs, share of liability, and means of procuring evidence. This process of active imagination rode on an uncomfortable tension between acknowledging the new possibilities offered by cryptographic technologies for securing electronic transactions, and their potential for subverting the essential features of the French written proof system, e.g., the special evidential force of authentic acts, protection against spurious manifestation of consent, and opposability of private acts.

Blanchette, J.-F. & Banat-Berger, F., "La dématérialisation des actes authentiques", Comma, International Journal on Archives, 2005.1 (in press). [PDF preprint]

Blanchette, J.-F., "Modernité et intelligibilité du droit de la preuve français", Communication Commerce électronique, 7(3):21-26 (March 2005). [PDF preprint]

Blanchette, J.-F. & Banat-Berger, F., "La « dématérialisation » du livre foncier d'Alsace-Moselle: Archivistique et preuve électronique", Document Numérique, special issue on "Archivage et pérennisation", 8(2):63-72. [PDF preprint]

Blanchette, J.-F., "Efficacité du droit et normes techniques", Lettre Recherche Droit et Justice, November 2002, 14:7-8. [PDF preprint]

Blanchette, J.-F., "Les technologies de l'écrit électronique: Synthèse et évaluation critique," in Les actes authentiques électroniques: Réflexion juridique prospective (ed. Isabelle de Lamberterie), pp. 139-203. Paris, La Documentation Française, 2002. [PDF preprint]

De Lamberterie, I. & Blanchette, J.-F., "Le décret du 30 mars 2001 relatif à la signature électronique: lecture critique, technique et juridique," La semaine juridique, édition Affaires et Entreprises, 30(July 26 2001): 1269-1275. [PDF preprint]

Blanchette, J.-F., "Civil law authenticity meets digital signatures --- a report from the trenches", in Proceedings of the DLM Forum 2002, Barcelona, 6-8 May 2002, pp. 512-519. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities, 2002. [PDF preprint]