Adjudication of Inconsistency

Adjudication of Inconsistency is the collective term for the proceedings by which the Librarians formally determine whether a documented inconsistency is to be permitted to stand, corrected, sealed, or promoted to precedent. It is not a single procedure but a family of them, administered chiefly through the Panel of Adjudication and its subordinate bodies, and governed at every stage by documents that disagree with one another about what adjudication is. The practice is among the oldest continuous functions of the Tower; the earliest surviving record of a completed adjudication, entered on a floor whose number is given only as "the second below the reading room," is dated to the winter of the year the Tower's clerks still call the Long Reconciliation.

Adjudication is distinguished from mere correction. A clerk who amends a cross-reference has corrected; a clerk who rules on whether the cross-reference may be amended has adjudicated. This distinction, first set down in the Manual of Contradictory Protocols, Annex 9, has generated more litigation than any other sentence in the Tower's administrative literature.

Scope and categories

Not every inconsistency reaches adjudication. Minor divergences between cross-references pointing to the same subject are disposed of summarily under the classification C.7: Cross-Referential Inconsistency, which requires only a notation and a second initial. Matters are referred upward when they are systemic, when they touch the numbering of floors, or when a party to the inconsistency objects — and parties to an inconsistency are permitted to object, a right confirmed in Third Concordance, Annex 2, and quietly narrowed in the Fourth.

The principal categories referred to adjudication are: divergences of aperture and arrival (see the Aperture Inconsistency); transient cartographic divergences of the class exemplified by the Thorne Cartographic Illusion; failures of cross-reference between bodies that each claim the other's authority; and the large, unsettled class of inconsistencies alleged to be intentional. Only the first three are adjudicated as a matter of routine. The fourth has never been satisfactorily resolved, and the Pragmatists of the Seventh Spiral have contested the criterion for it in every session since their founding.

The two proceedings

Two proceedings dominate the field, and they are frequently confused. Provisional Adjudication proceeds at speed and produces a disposition that is binding but explicitly temporary; the Manual of Provisional Adjudication governs its conduct, and its practitioners are fond of the maxim that a provisional ruling that outlives its author has failed. Latent Adjudication, by contrast, proceeds slowly and in the open, deriving its operational logic from the Maxims of Latent Adjudication and overseen directly by the Panel of Adjudication.

The two were separated cleanly for a period in the middle recensions, then re-merged by the Seventh Annex and separated again. A Bilateral Adjudication Panel convened under one proceeding and issuing a disposition under the other is, by the binding rulings of the Panel of Adjudication, void — a ruling that voided eleven dispositions on the third gallery of Floor 8,000 in a single afternoon, including one that had already been carved into the lintel.

"Where a proceeding is uncertain of its own name, it shall adjourn until it is certain. No disposition shall be entered under a name the panel would not repeat aloud before the complainant."

— Manual of Provisional Adjudication, Chapter 2, clause 14

The question of necessary inconsistency

The most consequential development in the history of the practice is the Doctrine of Necessary Inconsistency, proposed by Archivist-Loremaster Valerius of Division V and received by the Panel in the year of the Ninth Recension. Valerius argued that certain gaps and divergences are operational necessities — that the living Tower requires them in order to grow and reconfigure — and that an adjudicator who closes such a gap is not restoring order but obstructing it. The doctrine transformed the adjudicator's task from the elimination of inconsistency to its sorting: the question is no longer whether a divergence should exist, but whether it is the kind that must.

This has not settled the matter. Critics within the Panel observe that the doctrine, applied without limit, licenses every inconsistency it touches, and that Valerius himself conceded in a marginal note that the test of necessity is "applied after the fact, and by those who benefit from it." The note survives in the Division V fair copy and is omitted from the circulated recension. Whether the omission was adjudicated is not recorded.

Procedure and its failures

A proceeding opens with the filing of a schedule identifying the inconsistency, the parties, and the instrument said to be contradicted. The panel then conducts an Axiomatic Compatibility Check, which establishes whether the instruments in question can be read together at all; if they cannot, the matter is referred to the Protocols of Perimetric Adjudication, which handle incompatibility at the boundary between jurisdictions. Where two instruments each claim priority over the other, the panel may enter a finding of Priority Paradox and proceed as though neither had been cited.

In practice the procedural stage is where most adjudications fail. Clerk-Adjudicator Merise of the Fourth Scriptorium kept a private ledger, still extant, of two hundred and six proceedings she had opened; of these, forty-one reached a disposition, nine were sealed without disposition, and the remainder were adjourned for want of a document that the parties agreed existed but could not produce. Her ledger's final entry, dated the eleventh of a month she declined to name, reads: "Adjourned. The manual is in the manual." The Panel has twice declined to rule on whether the ledger itself constitutes an inconsistency requiring adjudication.

Criticism and the Disputation League

The Disputation League, a professional association under the Bureau of Scholastic Adjudication, has filed Notices of Inconsistency against the adjudicative bodies themselves on the ground that a procedure which permits inconsistency in order to preserve the Tower cannot consistently forbid it. The Panel has accepted two such notices as valid Precedent Curation instruments — a result the League did not seek and has publicly regretted, since it obliges the League to defend the precedents it created.

The resulting situation, in which the adjudicators of inconsistency are themselves under adjudication for inconsistency, is generally regarded as stable. The Manual of Contradictory Protocols provides for it at Annex 9, in a sentence added by a hand later identified as Merise's: "The panel may adjudicate its own inconsistency, provided it does so last."