Legalization

Legalization (also spelled legalisation) is the process of removing a legal prohibition against something which is currently not legal.

Legalization is a process often applied to what are regarded, by those working towards legalization, as victimless crimes, of which one example is the consumption of illegal drugs (see drug legalization).

Legalization should be contrasted with decriminalization, which removes criminal charges from an action, but leaves intact associated laws and regulations.

Proponents of libertarianism support legalization of what they regard as victimless crimes, such as recreational drug and alcohol use, gun ownership, and prostitution.

In U. S. immigration context, the term "legalization" is colloquially used to refer to a process whereby a person illegally present in the country can obtain lawful permanent residence. Since 1929, the US law has provided the legalization procedure known as registry, which simply requires the applicant to prove that he has continuously resided in the country since before a certain specified "registry date" (originally, 1921; presently, 1972), and is not inadmissible on other grounds (criminal history, etc.). One legalization proposal that was widely discussed recently was the DREAM Act.

Legalization (international law)

In international law, legalization is the process of authenticating or certifying a legal document so a foreign country's legal system will recognize it as with full legal effect.

Rationale and Procedure

Authentication by legalization is widely used in international commerce and civil law matters in those jurisdictions where the simpler apostille system has not been adopted (e.g.: Brazil, Canada, China).

Broadly speaking, the aim of any international document authentication process is to solve a fundamentally practical problem: how can civil and judicial officials reliably verify the authenticity of a document that was issued abroad? Legalization attempts to solve this dilemma by creating a chain of authentications, each by a progressively higher government authority so as to ultimately narrow the point of contact between countries to a single designated official (usually in the national department responsible for foreign affairs). Therefore, by authenticating the signature and seal of this final official a foreign jurisdiction can authenticate the entire chain of verifications back to the entity responsible for issuing the original document without scrutinizing each "link" individually.