Why Do We Sign Letters?
posted by Dave Hoffman
I have spent some time recently signing hundreds of clerkship recommendation letters. In itself, the process is a minor irritant, which I’m happy to do to help deserving students obtain jobs with judges after graduation. But, like many tedious things, the process inspires thoughts about what I could do to shortcut it.
Not signing letters isn’t an option. (Unless OSCAR sweeps the world of state courts too). In thinking about why, I’ve come to conclude, with no scholarly studies to back me up, that there is something interestingly persuasive about a signature.
Anecdotal evidence for the point comes every day in the mail. Not a day passes without receipt of “signed” letters from various selling agents (goods, services, political ideologies). Those agents have invested capital in an autopen, or in time, but either way they’ve put their money behind the persuasive force of a writing.
But this is strange. We all know that sales documents received in the mail, like clerkship letters, aren’t individualized. Signatures are rote (at best) or robotic (at worst). Rational buyers, and judges, ought to be indifferent between an inked signature and a “/s/electronic/s/” version. But inked signatures persist, despite their inefficiency. Why do they work?
I have a theory. I think that when we see a signature, we associate it with a contract, and our totemic beliefs (exposed in the beginning of every contract law class) in the ritual power of writing things down and signing them. In popular culture, contracts exist when they are signed (and, less frequently, sealed). So when we see a signature on a letter, I think it suggests a sort of warranty.
What is the content of the warranty? I bet it looks something like this:
My name is Dave Hoffman, and I endorse this message.
Even though you don’t know me from Adam, you can’t help but rely on that ritually-created warranty a little in deciding whether to buy what I’m selling. That is, signatures help bridge the gap between purely impersonal sales (the internet is the paradigm, surely) and the door-to-door salesmen of the past. By signing a letter to a judge, I’m associating myself with the message, making it marginally harder to ignore. (Any effect is smaller for my signature than for a professor that the judge has heard of, no doubt.)
In arriving on this explanation, I reject two other stories. It can’t be the identity-assuring role, because (1) we don’t know these agents’ handwriting; and (2) in the case of recommendation letters, the court can more cheaply rely on other proxies (letterhead) to serve that purpose. I also don’t think that inked John Hancocks are really analogous to the “signatures” on emails – the persistence of that convention is just habit, reinforced by moribund cultural norms.
Are there other theories?
June 8, 2006 at 12:01 am
Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics
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Responses (12)
Belle Lettre - June 8, 2006 at 2:12 am
Yours is a good theory. There is a lot to the idea that when we sign things, we endorse them–that there is some essence of us that is contained in our names, and the transcription of our names communicates that essence to others. Others, upon reading our names, recognize that essence as being tied to the document at hand.
When I was in college taking Latin and Medieval literature classes, I remember the prhase “manu propria”– meaning “signed with one’s own hand.” There are actually some very beautiful decorated letters from the period.
In later years, it was abbreviated to “m.p.” for governmental official documents, and I remember learning that it was used even in declarations of war up till WWI.
There is something very powerful in the phrase “signed by my own hand”–as if the power of your person and soul were behind that signature. It was a power used to wage wars. This is a rather diminished power when you delegate it to a machine.
Anton - June 8, 2006 at 3:24 am
The Law of Karma is one of the fundamental doctrines not only in Hinduism, but also in Buddhism, and in Jainism. As a man sows, so he shall reap. This is the Law of Karma. If you do an evil action, you must suffer for it. If you do a good action, you must get happiness. There is no power on this earth which can stop the actions from yielding their fruits. Every thought, every word, every deed is, as it were, weighed in the scales of eternal, divine Justice.
Putting pen to paper and signing it is just a mundane imitation of this basic cosmic principle of eventually being held liable for what you are saying and is mirrored in any legal system. It brings into consciousness the essence of what I am saying and why am I signing it. It is an attempt to tune into the divine sequence of words, thoughts and actions that will reinforce righteousness, produce wealth, pleasure and bring release from bondage.
As any really good lawyer, who has at length and carefully studied piles of papers when working on a court submission, knows, when looking at evidence containing signatures for long enough, his mind will eventually tune into the original intent of the writer. Call it clairvoyance if you like.
Give me a (non trivial) legal contract and I will tell you the character of its owner.
James Grimmelmann - June 8, 2006 at 8:11 am
One factor is that signatures are prevalent because they’re prevalent. If you do not sign a letter, you are signalling that there might be something wrong with you or with the letter. After all, why else would you have declined to sign? That’s at least what the recipient might think.
In the case of clerkship letters (and other of the cases you mention), the signature also makes it harder to crank out piles and piles of them. Not very much harder, true — and in the case of mass mailings, the autopen or other reproduction technology often renders this issue irrelevant — but enough to have some effect at the margin. It’s a weaker form of the reason that formulaic letters of recommendation have little impact. A personally tailored letter may not be as glowing, but you know that the author doesn’t send them out for just anyone.
Eh Nonymous - June 8, 2006 at 9:47 am
More, it’s a small deterrant to fraud.
If I were a cheating student, I’d not hesitate to create a fake recommendation letter, if there were no one to point out it wasn’t real, and few consequences to me if I was found out.
But if I sign someone else’s name, that’s a step beyond mere fakery in applications. It’s akin to making that verifying statement you state above (My name is X, and I approved this statement), when you know for a fact that you’re not X, and that X didn’t. It becomes something that looks more like forgery, false representations under oath (and yes, I know you aren’t really swearing when you sign, just ‘verifying’), impersonation, maybe attempted fraud using false identification. Mail fraud, anyone?
So I think there’s certainly a reason to keep requiring signatures. It makes cheating much more serious, and somewhat easier to catch.
Bruce - June 8, 2006 at 11:07 am
I think that when we see a signature, we associate it with a contract, and our totemic beliefs (exposed in the beginning of every contract law class) in the ritual power of writing things down and signing them. In popular culture, contracts exist when they are signed (and, less frequently, sealed).
Well, OK, but that just pushes the mystery one level down. Why do we still attach special significance to handwritten signatures on contracts? I think it’s because a signature is a cheap and easy mechanism to determine when a document is final (as opposed to a draft letter that accidentally got put in the mail, or a term sheet). Almost everyone can make a signature, and they are not easy to forge. Plus, as you note, cultural norms indicate that signing a document invests it with special significance, so it’s not likely to get signed prematurely.
BTW, this reminds me of the time when, while my mother was signing something, I announced that it was OK if we immediately changed our minds because “signing a contract has no magical significance.” Even the other lawyer in the room was pretty skeptical. I guess that’s why I became a law professor.
Ross - June 12, 2006 at 4:57 pm
The theories already discussed seem logical, but I am not convinced that the real answer to signature preference lies in an analysis bases on warranty or contractual significance. I think that perhaps a signature is away of “being there” with the reader; using some device that is temporally transcendent. Letters are not “by” someone, they are “from” someone. By placing ones own special representation of one’s name, we give the reader something to look at that stands for the author. I don’t mean this isn the “I am Dave Hoffman; I endorse this message” kind of way, but rather that the signature is an artifact that bridges the gap. In some ways, this is probably even more pronounced as a side effect of the seal; it implied a process as well as a symbolic reference. With an actual name, it an even more personal process, even when in practice we write our signatures thousands of times; each time we create evidence that we were there when the message creation was complete. It is not so much an endorsement then, it simply marks a historical construct of the creator phase in a simplex communication form.
I think people like to know that someone was there on the other side of the message, and the author of a letter is a fairly shadowy referent for the receiver. Simplex communication forms simply need a proxy for the message creator or they could lose meaning for the receiver. Maybe this a little too Marshall McLuhan, but I think as long as we use the medium of letters we will need signatures with them, or the form will be broken. They would no longer be “from” someone, and thus the receiver is left a little lonely, and may not readily know what to do with the contents.
Ryan Walters - June 14, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Here’s a somewhat tangentially-related question: do your schools let students include the faculty recommendation letters with their clerkship application? My school, the University of California, Davis (UC Davis, King Hall), required the letters to be mailed separately even when we told the Career Center that we heard from chambers that never bothered to correlate the applications with the letters.
Adultpm - November 16, 2006 at 12:34 am
Dr.Dorcell - May 2, 2007 at 9:22 pm
laura - September 7, 2007 at 8:54 pm
It is true that signing someone’s signature to a document is fraud, but if the facts in the document were true, is it as bad as if someone cheated someone else out of something? Also, although it would not be in someone’s best interest to sign someone elses name to a document where all the facts were true, would it be considered immoral? I am very interested in opinions.
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