Adjudication Chamber 117-B

Adjudication Chamber 117-B is the designation given to a subsidiary hearing room of the Adjudication Chamber, cut directly into the riser between Floor 117 and Floor 118 and reached by a service stair that appears on no plan of that floor. It is the smallest chamber empowered to issue a binding interlocutory ruling, a consequence of its original use as a store for long-case clocks, and its caseload consists almost entirely of matters too small for the main chamber and too stubborn for Appeal Routing to dispose of by correspondence.

The chamber was fitted out in the spring of 2988 under Concordance 61, which permitted the Adjudication Chamber to delegate routine hearings to rooms of not fewer than nine seats. Chamber 117-B has eight. It has sat continuously since on the strength of a footnote added by the chamberlain of the day, asserting that the ninth seat is the witness stool, which is bolted to the wall and cannot be occupied by a party.

Physical description

The room measures four and a half metres by three, with a barrel-vaulted ceiling that forces all standing parties to stoop. Its bench is a converted clock counter of dark oak, scarred at the left end by three hundred years of pendulum weights. Two brass pendulum bobs, recovered during the fitting-out and retained as fixtures, hang above the bench and are cited in several rulings as though they were officers of the chamber.

The chamber's Adjudicative Aperture is a letter-slit in the north wall, seven centimetres wide, which admits appeals but no light. Clerks refer to the resulting draught as the aperture's opinion. Filings submitted after the lamps are trimmed are accepted at the discretion of the usher, who is not required to be present.

Jurisdiction and practice

Chamber 117-B hears disputes arising from the numbering, naming, or accidental duplication of holdings below Floor 200. Its rulings bind the parties before it and no one else, a limitation that has caused difficulty on at least four occasions. In the matter of Two Catalogues of the Same Stairhead (117-B/14), the chamber found a floor to have two irreconcilable names and ordered both struck, leaving the floor nameless for the eleven days it took the main chamber to reverse the order. The reversal is printed in full in the chamber's own minute book, with the note: "Reversed. Clerk reminded."

The chamber does not sit on the anniversaries of its fitting-out, nor during the fortnight in which the clocks it once held are wound elsewhere in the Tower, an arrangement no one now remembers making and no one has seen fit to end.

The question of precedence

There is an unresolved scholarly dispute over whether Chamber 117-B is a chamber of the Adjudication Chamber or a separate body that happens to share its name. Third Concordance, Annex 4, treats subsidiary rooms as "extensions of the bench, and not benches", which would deny 117-B any standing of its own. Concordance 92 as amended in the winter of 3051 by the Adjudication Chamber takes the opposite view, restoring original wording that counts every seated room as a chamber "whether or not a ninth chair is present".

"A room that hears is a chamber, and a chamber that rules is a court, and a court that is small is not thereby less a court."

— Concordance 92, clause 2, as restored

The Chamber Assembly has twice declined to resolve the question, on the grounds that a ruling either way would require it to say how many chambers exist, which it has never been able to do. The practical effect is that 117-B's rulings are enforced when convenient and treated as advice when not. Its usher keeps two stamps for this reason.

The grievance of Clerk Anselm Vey

In the winter of 3041 the chamber's recording clerk, Anselm Vey, submitted a memorial complaining that the pendulum bobs above the bench were being cited in minutes as if present, and that he had been required to record rulings "in a room that contains four parties, two bobs, and no quorum". Vey requested either the removal of the bobs or a formal ruling that they did not count toward the seating requirement. Neither was granted. The chamber instead adopted the practice, still in force, of recording the bobs' silence as a separate entry in the minute book, where it now occupies some forty folios.

Vey was reassigned to Hall of Adjudication in 3043 and is remembered chiefly for the marginal note he left in the 117-B register: "The bobs do not vote. They have never voted. I have asked." The note was later cited by the Chamber of Recursive Justification as evidence that non-voting fixtures can nonetheless hold office, a conclusion that chamber has since declined to explain.

Access and incidents

The service stair to 117-B is unlocked between the second and ninth hour. Parties arriving outside that window are directed to the Atrium of Authority, where a duty clerk will take their names and advise them to return. In 3069 a delegation from the Catalogue of Disputed Cartography waited on the stair for three days under the impression that the chamber was sitting in permanent session, having misread the phrase sits continuously in the fitting-out record. The delegation was heard on the fourth day and its dispute, concerning a floor that appeared on two maps in different positions, was resolved in eleven minutes.

The chamber has no clock. Visitors are asked not to bring one, a rule posted at the foot of the stair and enforced without exception since 2988.