A Single Clause — The Tower

Definition and standing

A Single Clause is the unit of legislative measure recognised throughout the Tower as the smallest division of a Concordance, Ordinance, or Annex that may be cited on its own authority. It is defined operationally by Clause 1.1 of the First Concordance, which holds that a clause "begins where the semicolon of its predecessor ends, or at the opening of the enumerated matter, whichever the engrossing clerk prefers at the time of fair copying." The clause is the atom of Tower governance: disputes are settled by it, expeditions of interpretation are organised around it, and no fewer than nine floors of the archive are given over entirely to the physical storage of loose clauses removed from their parent documents.

The designation of a clause follows no universal scheme. Ordinances number their clauses in Arabic numerals to two decimal places (see Clause 44.2); Concordances favour Roman numerals at the top level and revert to Arabic below (see Third Concordance); the annexes of the Tenth Concordance number their clauses by the day of the month on which they were drafted. A single clause may therefore appear as 33, as VII, as 14-Δ, or as "Tuesday's clause" without any of these being incorrect.

The single-clause problem

Because a clause is defined by its punctuation rather than its sense, the Tower has long contended with what archivists call the single-clause problem: documents that consist, in their entirety, of one clause, and documents that consist of one clause which has been fair-copied into a separate membrane and given its own seal. The two are legally indistinguishable but materially different, and the distinction has occupied the Vault of Primary Documents for the better part of four centuries.

The leading illustration is Clause 44.2, a sub-division of Clause 44 within the Second Concordance, which governs the permissible density of abstract concepts within a single cataloguing volume. Read on its own, Clause 44.2 permits two abstractions per page. Read as a sub-clause of Clause 44, it permits two abstractions per page *unless the volume is held in the Central Stack*, in which case it permits none. The discrepancy was not noticed until the winter of 3109, when the entire contents of the Quiet Bureaus were found to be in violation of a rule no one had been applying.

Disputed scope

The principal scholarly disagreement concerns how far a single clause may be severed from its parent without losing force. The strict constructionists of the Repository hold that a clause citation is meaningless without the sentence in which it was fair-copied, and that a clause quoted alone is merely a string of words. The opposing view, associated with Librarian Aris and the Doctrine of Implied Omnipotence, holds that a sufficiently weighty clause — Clause VII of the Fourth Concordance, for instance — constitutes a meta-legal principle that survives severance and in fact prefers it.

Clause 33, Annex Delta of Ordinance 7 attempts to settle the question by defining a single-step process for Receding Conclusion audits, under which the auditing clerk reads the clause, then reads the clause backwards, then signs. The process has been criticised as procedural rather than substantive. The criticism appears in SC-45, which is dated 14-Δ-7823 and consists of a single clause and three attendant procedural footnotes; whether the footnotes are themselves clauses has never been resolved, and the matter is currently before the Curatorial Assembly.

Storage

Loose clauses are housed on Floor 88 of the Central Stack in acid-neutral folders, one clause per folder, arranged not by parent document but by the hand of the engrossing clerk. The arrangement dates from a 2901 ruling of the Quiet Bureaus holding that "a clerk's hand is a more durable classification than a document's number." Floor 88 receives north light through a single Lumen Aperture calibrated to Clause 7 of Ordinance 12; visitors should note that the aperture closes for two hours at midday and that the folders cannot be read by Single-Source Illumination alone during that interval.

Cross-references between a loose clause and its former parent are maintained by hand in the margins of both, a practice the archivists of the Erg of Notation have repeatedly requested be abandoned on the grounds that the margins are full. The request has been unseconded on eleven occasions, most recently by the Archivist for Unseconded Motions.

Citation practice

A single clause is cited in full on first mention in any catalogue entry and thereafter by number alone. Where two clauses in different documents share a number, the parent document is reintroduced in parentheses. The practice is laid down in Annex 7, Clause 22 of Concordance 117, which also defines the standard Tick used to time the reading of a clause aloud during ratification.

The Seventh Concordance, Clause 881, separately mandates that irreconcilable factual statements about a single clause be entered as separate holdings rather than reconciled. Two such entries exist for Clause 33 of Ordinance 7: one holding it to be eleven words long, another holding it to be eleven words long excluding the closing semicolon. Both are catalogued; neither is withdrawn.