Advisory Precedents

Advisory Precedents are non-binding interpretations issued by designated consultative bodies of the Tower, recorded in a separate annex to the Precedent Register known informally as the Grey Ledger, and cited in ordinary floor practice as though they bound anyone. They do not. The distinction is maintained with great care in writing and ignored with great consistency in argument. An Advisory Precedent settles nothing, but a floor that proceeds without one is asked, later, why it did not seek one.

The right to issue an Advisory Precedent descends from the right to establish a Body, and is therefore read through the Advisory Precedents themselves — a circularity acknowledged in Advisory Precedents A-114, which the Index of Ambiguous Precedents lists simply as ambiguous and declines to elaborate upon.

Procedure and Recording

An Advisory Precedent is drafted by the issuing body, sealed, and deposited with the Clerk of Precedents, who enters it in the Grey Ledger within nine days of receipt or, in the case of Precedents touching vertical transit, within fourteen. The Clerk maintains that the nine-day rule has been observed without exception since the office was created; the Society for Informed Ascent maintains otherwise and has twice produced a receipt. No reconciliation of the two positions has been attempted since the winter of 508, when a proposed joint audit of the Ledger's folios 112 to 140 was withdrawn by mutual agreement.

Recorded Precedents are held at the Vault of Precedents and, where their subject matter is deemed sensitive, transferred to The Vault of Binding Precedents — a name the Vault's custodians describe as vestigial, and which has caused more confusion than any other designation in the register. Precedents withdrawn before sealing go to the Chamber of Vanishing Precedents; those that were never written at all are administered, in a sense, by The Bureau of Unstated Precedents, which keeps a shelf for them and a ledger of their absence.

Issuing Bodies

Three bodies account for the great majority of the Grey Ledger. The Bureau of Implementable Abstraction issues most prolifically and on the widest range of subjects; the Subcommittee for Orthographic Purity issued the first Precedents concerning non-linear narratives, in 462, and has been refining them since; and the Society for Informed Ascent issues on matters of vertical transit and inter-floor cataloguing coherence, including Advisory Precedent Gamma/SIA-303, which is cited on stairwells more often than it is read.

Consultative bodies issue Precedents at the Tower generally, not at any particular floor, though the Amphitheatre of Precedents is the customary place of their reading aloud and the only room in which a Precedent may be formally heard rather than merely cited.

Status and the Omega Settlement

Because Advisory Precedents cannot contravene Desk Omega judgements, the doctrine of Advisory Subordination was codified in Clause I of Ruling Omega-V/Advisory, issued by Desk Omega on 19 Metageitnion, 511:

"No Advisory Precedent shall be received against a Ruling of this Desk, however often it is cited, however convenient its citation, and however senior the clerk citing it."

— Ruling Omega-V/Advisory, Clause I

The Clause is quoted in nearly every procedural dispute and has been applied in fewer than forty. Clerks observe that a Precedent need only be cited, not applied, to do its work.

Precedential Impasse

Where two Advisory Precedents conflict, cataloguing may deadlock, producing a Precedential Impasse. The remedy is a Suspension of Vertical Precedent, under which the conflicting entries are held in place and no floor above or below may be reorganised until the Impasse is resolved or the floors in question are renumbered. The latter has happened eleven times since 494 and is not regarded as a resolution.

The Right of Unreading is invoked in such circumstances more often than any other provision of the Advisory Precedents, generally by the party who entered the Precedent into argument in the first place. The Curator of Precedents has noted, without comment, that the right is never invoked before citation.

Disputed Questions

Scholars disagree on whether an Advisory Precedent exists from the moment of sealing or from the moment of entry in the Grey Ledger. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, holds for sealing; the Seventh Concordance, Annex 4, which addresses the same question at greater length, holds for entry. The Silent Precedents — entered but never discussed — are offered by some as evidence that entry alone confers nothing.

A second dispute concerns the Advisory Board, which appoints Validators to the Board of Mandates by consensus but has never issued an Advisory Precedent of its own. Advisory Opinion 17 (4119) is frequently cited as though it were one; it is not, and the Clerk of Precedents has declined four requests to say so in writing.

Visitors wishing to consult the Grey Ledger should note that the reading room closes at the ninth bell, that ink is not provided, and that no more than two Precedents may be requested at a time.