Amendment 12(b).1 (4 Germinal, Cycle 7-455)

Amendment 12(b).1 (4 Germinal, Cycle 7-455) was a procedural instrument of the Ninety-Seventh Amendment series, ratified on the fourth day of Germinal in the cycle designated 7-455, by which the Librarians first fixed a standing rule for the disposal of amendments overtaken by their own ratifying documents. It is best remembered as the parent clause of Amendment 12(b).4, ratified one thousand cycles later on 19 Fructidor, Cycle 166, and as the earliest surviving attempt to define what a clause does when the instrument it modifies has not yet come into force. It runs to a single annex and four sub-paragraphs, and has been amended twice without any of its sub-paragraphs being altered.

Origin and drafting

The amendment arose from a backlog in the Office of Concordant Sequestration, which by Cycle 7-450 held some eleven hundred instruments awaiting the ratification of the documents they modified. A clerk of that office, Aledwen Marchetti of the Fourth Scriptorium, recorded in her register of 27 Ventôse, Cycle 7-454, that the backlog had become "a queue whose front is not the beginning and whose end is not the last" (Register of the Fourth Scriptorium, fol. 118). Her proposed solution — that an amendment be deemed ratified in the same hour as its parent instrument, "neither before nor with any interval that could be measured by a second seal" — was adopted nearly entire, with one deletion.

The deletion was the phrase "and thereafter forgotten," which the drafting committee struck on the grounds that it described a duty rather than a fact. The amendment was promulgated on 4 Germinal, Cycle 7-455, and entered in the Master Amendment Log under the entry for the fourteenth day of that month.

Text and operation

The operative provision is sub-paragraph (b).1 itself, which reads in the recension held by the Chamber of Recensions:

"Where an amendment modifies an instrument not yet ratified, the amendment shall be read as ratified at the moment of that instrument's ratification, and its numbering shall be held in suspension until that moment, and shall not be cited in the interval, and shall not be presumed lapsed by reason of the interval."

— Amendment 12(b).1, sub-paragraph (b).1, recension of 61 Ventôse, Cycle 7-460

In practice the clause produced the difficulty its drafters had not foreseen. Instruments held in suspension could not be cited, and an instrument that could not be cited could not be indexed; and an instrument that could not be indexed could not be found by the clerks whose duty it was to ratify the parent documents. The backlog, having been given a rule, grew by roughly forty per cent in the first ninety cycles after ratification. The Committee of Concordant Reconciliation addressed this in passing in Clarification 44-Z, though that document concerns a different series and its observations are, strictly, dicta.

Maintenance notes appended to the annex in Cycle 7-502 direct that suspended instruments be stored spine-inward and not marked with the suspended number in chalk. The reason given is legibility of the shelf edge.

The numbering dispute

Scholars do not agree on what the designation 7-455 denotes. The SeventhĠConcordance reads the numerals as the seventh subdivision of the 455th cycle of a reckoning abandoned in the Aperture Reckoning and never formally repealed; its commentators hold that the amendment is therefore older than its position in the log suggests, perhaps by as much as two centuries, and that the fourth of Germinal belongs to a year the Tower has since declined to count. Against this, the Seventh Revision Concordancetwelfth argues that 7-455 is a Sequestration Cycle number of the ordinary kind and that the hyphen is a copying error for a full point, an opinion supported by the Master Amendment Log's own entry, which shows a point and a marginal note in a later hand correcting it to a hyphen.

The disagreement matters chiefly for precedence. If the earlier reading holds, Amendment 12(b).1 predates the Seventh Amendment and its rule on the citation of unnumbered floors should be read into it; if the later, it does not, and the sub-paragraph stands alone. Neither party has requested a formal determination, and the Committee has twice declined to give one without being asked.

Relationship to Amendment 12(b).4

Amendment 12(b).4 was drafted as an extension of this clause and adopted its definition of suspension without alteration, adding only a schedule of hours for the sealing of suspended instruments. The later amendment's contentious ratification, and the resulting creation of Amendment 117.45.β in the 4,213th Cycle of Record, are often traced back to the suspension provision here, on the argument that a clause which permits an instrument to exist uncited will eventually permit it to be cited twice. The Matter of the Self-Referential Amendment was decided on adjacent reasoning, though the Tribunal there distinguished 12(b).1 expressly.

Survival and present status

Amendment 12(b).1 has never been repealed. It was reaffirmed without debate in the 12,004th Cycle alongside Amendment 7, and again, more cautiously, in the consolidation that produced Amendment 7 (830-Φ). Its sub-paragraph on suspension was copied entire into the Floor Ecologysubsistence Cycle Clause in Cycle 13, where it governs the timing of subsistence amendments and has been the subject of at least one complaint per cycle since. The complaint of Cycle 440, lodged by a stair-warden of the eleventh landing, is preserved in the Chamber of Recensions and consists of a single sentence: that the clause had suspended an amendment to his own ration and released it eleven years later, by which time he had stopped counting.

Copies of the amendment are held at the Fourth Scriptorium, at the Chamber of Recensions, and in the annex of the Concordance of Measured Hours, the last of these being incomplete after sub-paragraph (b).3. A revision is understood to be in preparation but has not been entered in the log.