Summons

The U.S. legal system has a step for almost all proceedings, called a summons. This is sort of a racket, whereby the plaintiff has to give some outside service a fee to have a summons served to the defendant. The plaintiff can't just show up and serve the defendant themselves. Dave needed to serve me the divorce papers, but it would not be legally binding if he just gave them to me. It was however also prohibitively expensive to get a server to present me with the summons here in Iceland.

Now, the legal system in the United States cannot force a person to use a paid process server, and the court documents simply call for a third party to do the serving. So we decided to ask our friend Jana, who is also getting divorced, to sign off as the server, and I suppose we'll do the same for her when the time comes.

I do not believe there are process servers here in Iceland, but I am sitting here in the library with that economics professor, Hannes, sitting across from me, and well, it just made me think.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Jú, við erum með svona process servers hér, starfsheitið er stefnuvottur. Maður þarf þá ekki fyrir skilnaði eða þannig, en ef er verið að ganga að eignum fólks eða þannig lagað, eða verið að boða fólk fyrir dóm er stefnuvottur sendur. Ég þekki tvo sem hafa gegnt þessu starfi.
September 23, 2009 at 8:38 PM
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