An act is an instrument that records a fact or something that has been said, done, or agreed. Acts generally take the form of legal instruments of writing that have probative value and executory force. They are usually accepted as self-authenticating demonstrative evidence in court proceedings, though with the precarious status of notaries public and their acts under common law, this is not always so.
Common types of acts are legislative, judicial, and notarial acts.
___Primary_and_secondary_legislation_q.jpg)
Legal instrument is a legal term of art that is used for any formally executed written document that can be formally attributed to its author, records and formally expresses a legally enforceable act, process, or contractual duty, obligation, or right, and therefore evidences that act, process, or agreement. Examples include a certificate, deed, bond, contract, will, legislative act, notarial act, court writ or process, or any law passed by a competent legislative body in domestic or international law. Many legal instruments were written under seal by affixing a wax or paper seal to the document in evidence of its legal execution and authenticity (which often removed the need for consideration in contract law). However, today, many jurisdictions have abolished the requirement for documents to be under seal in order for them to have legal effect.
Primary legislation and secondary legislation (the latter also called delegated legislation or subordinate legislation) are two forms of law, created respectively by the legislative and executive branches of governments in representative democracies. Primary legislation generally consists of statutes, also known as "acts", that set out broad principles and rules, but may delegate specific authority to an executive branch to make more specific laws under the aegis of the principal act. The executive branch can then issue secondary legislation (often by order-in-council in parliamentary systems, or by regulatory agencies in presidential systems), creating legally enforceable regulations and the procedures for implementing them.
Fragmentology is the study of surviving fragments of manuscripts (mainly manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the case of European manuscript cultures). A manuscript fragment may consist of whole or partial leaves, typically made of parchment, conjugate pairs or sometimes gatherings of a parchment book or codex, or parts of single-leaf documents such as notarial acts. They are commonly found in book bindings, especially printed books from the 15th to the 17th centuries, used in a variety of ways such as wrappers or covers for the book, as endpapers, or cut into pieces and used to reinforce the binding. In other non-Western manuscript cultures, fragments of paper manuscripts and other materials, takes place beside parchment, including board covers that many times reused written paper.
In recent years, fragmentology has become an active part of scholarly medieval studies fueled by the abundance in institutional libraries of binding fragments that have never been studied or even catalogued. A number of symposia, websites and projects have been formed to pursue the study. In their field-defining editorial, William Duba and Christoph Flüeler note that fragmentology's "transdisciplinary nature requires the collaboration of specialists trained in a range of fields, not just paleography, codicology, and diplomatics, but also the history of the printed book, the history of libraries, musicology, art history, intellectual history, digital humanities – in sum, most historical arts dealing with content on a page."
The Mexican Secularization Act of 1833, officially called the Decree for the Secularization of the Missions of California, was an act passed by the Congress of the Union of the First Mexican Republic which secularized the Californian missions. The act nationalized the missions, transferring their ownership from the Franciscan Order of the Catholic Church to the Mexican authorities.
The act was passed twelve years after Mexico won its independence from Spain in 1821. Mexico feared Spain would continue to have influence and power in California because most of the Spanish missions in California remained loyal to the Roman Catholic Church in Spain. As the new Mexican republic matured, calls for the secularization ("disestablishment") of the missions increased.