As readers may be aware, President Joe Biden’s portrait in the White House has been replaced with an image of an ‘autopen’ signing his name. The device, which is mechanical in nature, replicates the original signature of a living person. It has been in existence for some time (Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) bought a more rudimentary form of the device), and a large number of presidents have used it, starting with President Harry Truman.
The use of the device does raise some interesting questions for lawyers. If the signature is not ‘genuine’ in the traditional sense that people tend to understand it (ie, the relevant person has signed the document in the room with his or her own hand), then why does one require a signature at all? In an age of e-signatures on PDFs, which, again, are not anything like traditional ‘wet ink’ signatures, are traditional signatures really necessary these days?
Limited use
The use of the autopen has been largely uncontroversial, but only because its use was very limited; President Truman,
