From The Perspective Of Public Service Development And Improvement Of China's Notary System

Notarization means an act performed by a notarial institution, upon the application of a party concerned, such as certifying the authenticity and legality of a legal act, a document or a fact of legal significance according to the statutory procedures, with the concept based on prevention. By intervening in civil and business affairs, notarization can filtrate illegal and negative factors, and play an essential role in dispute precaution, sustaining economical development and social harmony. With the advance of the improvement of socialism market economy and the growing social needs of objectiveness and impartiality, now is the right time to carry out notary system reform.The introduction of "Notarization Law" is a great progress in China's notary system, but obviously it is not the final stop of the reform. Notary system still needs to be improved in many ways:the providers of notary service are not unified, developments of notarization differ from area to area, and the tendency of notary service marketization gets more and more serious. All these factors encumber the healthy development of the notary service, and influence the performing of public service efficiency. It is quite necessary to think about and explore a way to optimize and adjust the notary system to make it perform better.I think, notarization, with the nature of quasi-public goods, is one of the public services. This paper is therefore intended to analyze the theory and the practice of development of notary system from the perspective of "public services". The paper learns from foreign experiences on the reform of notary system, reviews the development of our country's notary system and probes into existing situations and problems of notarization from both regional and national levels. Upon this basis, the paper analyzes the nature of public services, the probable methods and routes with the help of the theories of "public products", "government functions", "governance and good governance" and so on. Finally some preliminary ideas on optimizing notary system of our country have been put forward as follows:defining notarization institutions as NPOs; increasing the support to notarial institutions with reference to successful experiences of NPOs and notary systems reform in other countries; Rationalizing the notarization management mechanism in order to have the NPOs playing a greater role in providing notarization service. All the above proposals are to be aimed at displaying the effect of public services of notarization to the maximum.