This decision resolved two appeals involving questions about the formalities that must be followed when executing a nuptial agreement. In the first appeal, Anderson v. Anderson, the question was whether a signature on a nuptial agreement must be acknowledged at the time the signature is made. In the second appeal, Matter of Koegel, the question was whether a defect in a timely acknowledgement could be cured after the fact by extrinsic evidence. In a unanimous opinion (Rivera, J.), the Court held that a signature must be acknowledged within a reasonable time after the signing, but that extrinsic evidence was permitted to cure a defective, though timely, acknowledgement.
Acknowledgement is one way to verify the identity of a person who signs a document. In essence, it requires a signer to acknowledge to a third person that the signer is the person whose signature appears on the document. To be valid, an acknowledgement must be proved and there are a couple of ways to prove a valid acknowledgement. These cases involved the method of proof called proof by a subscribing witness. Under that method, the signer acknowledges their signature to another person (the subscribing witness), who then affirms that they know the signer to be the person who the signer claims to be. The subscribing witness’s proof must itself be verified by a notary public, who must affirm either that they knew the subscribing witness or verified the witness’s identity. For the acknowledgement to be complete, the notary must complete a certificate documenting the information required from the subscribing witness and from the notary, and the certificate must be attached to the document that required an acknowledgement.
As noted, these appeals raised two wrinkles about the acknowledgement procedure. The first was whether an acknowledgement could be valid even though it was given long after the signature that was to be acknowledged. That’s what happened in Anderson. A husband and wife executed a nuptial agreement at the time of their wedding. The wife contemporaneously acknowledged her signature, but the husband didn’t; instead, he waited seven years to acknowledge his signature, until right before he commenced a divorce proceeding. Looking to avoid the nuptial agreement, the wife claimed it was unenforceable because the signatures had not been timely acknowledged.
The Court of Appeals agreed. One function of an acknowledgment is to “solemnize[ ] the consequences of signing the nuptial agreement.” This purpose would be defeated, the Court explained, if a party could provide the requisite acknowledgement long after the agreement was executed. Instead, to be valid, an acknowledgement must be made within a “reasonable time” of the relevant signature. The Court clarified that this approach did not require “an acknowledgment to occur at the moment that a party signs the document or at the same time the other party signs and acknowledges the document”; a “brief lapse in time” would be acceptable. And the Court added that its rule would not preclude parties from signing and acknowledging a document in counterparts. But the Court concluded that the seven years waited in Anderson was too much: sanctioning the acknowledgement under those circumstances would unacceptably give one party effectively an option to reevaluate the nuptial agreement at will.
The second wrinkle was whether an acknowledgment, which was entirely valid except that the accompanying certificate failed to contain the necessary recitations, could be cured at a later date by extrinsic evidence. In Koegel, both parties to a nuptial agreement signed the document and acknowledged their signatures to a subscribing witness, and both witnesses prepared and affixed certificates as required by statute. But the certificates failed to say that the witness knew the signer, although this was “indisputably” true. The husband died and, in the context of his probate proceeding, the wife sought to avoid the nuptial agreement on the ground that the acknowledgements were invalid.
The Court held that the acknowledgement was valid under those circumstances. Distinguishing between a defective acknowledgement and an absent one, the Court explained that allowing the opportunity to cure in cases of an absent acknowledgement would frustrate the purposes of the acknowledgement requirement. But the same was not true in cases where the parties “have done all that the [law] requires of them” and were tripped up only by an error in the paperwork. What’s more, those kinds of errors were likely to occur infrequently since New York began providing a form acknowledgement that contains the required recitations in 1997.