§ 121.014.Action for Damages

The chapter’s enforcement provision, and it runs against the officer personally.

A person injured by the failure, refusal, or neglect of an officer to comply with a provision of this chapter has a cause of action against the officer to recover damages resulting from it.

Three verbs cover three different failures. Failure is not doing what the chapter requires; refusal is declining when asked; neglect is doing it carelessly. A notary who takes an acknowledgment without checking identity, one who declines to issue a subpoena the chapter makes mandatory, and one who keeps the register badly are each within it.

The claim requires injury and causation. Damages are those resulting from the failure, so a defective acknowledgment that harms nobody supports no claim.

Where the harm arises is usually the recording. An acknowledgment taken without identifying the signer can put a forged deed into the county records, and the loss falls on whoever relied on it.

The section reaches the officer, not the employer. Ordinary agency principles may bring in an employing title company or bank, but this cause of action is against the officer.

Read with the identity section, the chapter’s design is coherent. That section says what the officer must do and closes the list of acceptable evidence; this section supplies the consequence of not doing it.

The claim is a companion to the notary’s bond and to the disciplinary regime, not a replacement for either — this is the injured person’s own remedy.