Anticipatory Concession

The Anticipatory Concession is the doctrine under which the Tower grants permissions for actions that have not yet occurred and may never occur, on the understanding that the eventual execution of such an action retroactively validates the concession that preceded it. It is the cornerstone of the operational philosophy of the Department of Anticipatory Acquisitions and, by extension, of Anticipatory Cataloging throughout the vertical holdings. First set out as an operational doctrine by Resolution 1, it was later enumerated in formal terms at Clause 19.β of the Fifth Concordance, and its influence is acknowledged in the opening sections of the Ordinance of Anticipatory Filing.

Origin and codification

The principle emerged from a procedural difficulty recorded in the minutes of the Bureau of Preceding Acts: a request for permission could not be examined unless it described the act it sought to permit, while the act could not be undertaken until permission had been granted. For eleven years the Bureau resolved this by permitting nothing and describing nothing. The deadlock was broken by Resolution 1, which inverted the order of operations — permission now preceded the conceivable act, and the act, when performed, was held to have been lawful all along.

The Fifth Concordance gave the doctrine its canonical phrasing. Clause 19.β states:

"A concession granted for a conceivable action is not void for want of the action. The action, when it arrives, is received into the concession as though it had never been absent."

— Fifth Concordance, Clause 19.β

Subsequent recensions of the Concordance preserve the clause with minor amendments to the punctuation, which the Office of Textual Settlement has ruled on four separate occasions.

Application

In practice the Concession underwrites three administrative instruments: the Receipt of Anticipatory Intent, issued in the form of Form OVC-22a; the standing body of Anticipatory Entries maintained on the upper cataloguing floors; and the treatment of dust under the Attribute of Anticipatory Dust, which construes the predicted settling of particulates as a formal petition awaiting concession. The Receipt of Anticipatory Intent is derived directly from the principle and cannot be issued without a citation of it, a requirement enforced since the Assize of the Sealed Annex in the winter of the year the Sixteenth Spiral closed.

The department has argued, in a submission to the Standing Committee on Precedent, that the Concession is best understood as a sorting rule rather than a grant — an algorithm derived from the principle that orders requests in the Register of Standing Requests according to the likelihood of their eventual performance. The committee has neither accepted nor rejected this reading; it has scheduled the question for a hearing after the question itself is next raised.

Rulings and incidents

The doctrine was tested in the matter of Clerk Mirelle Ostend, of the lower registration scriptorium on Floor 812, who between the years recorded as 4 and 9 of the current recension issued forty-one concessions for the removal of a single bookcase from the Northern Reading Gallery. No removal was performed. In the tenth year the bookcase was found to have been removed already, some decades earlier, by parties unknown. The Court of Settlement ruled that Ostend's concessions were valid, that the bookcase had never existed in the location described, and that the matter was therefore outside the Court's competence. Ostend petitioned for reimbursement of the sealing wax expended on forty-one seals, a figure she put at eleven ounces. The petition was granted in respect of thirty-nine seals. She has declined to comment on the remaining two.

A separate dispute, still unresolved, concerns whether a concession may be granted for an action the petitioner is contractually forbidden to perform. The Third Concordance, Annex 7, holds that it may not; the Fifth, at Clause 19.β, makes no such restriction and appears to presume the contrary. The Office of Textual Settlement has declined to harmonise the two, noting only that contradictions between Concordances are a recognised means by which disputes are settled rather than a fault in the record.

Controversy

Critics within the College of Registrars have observed that a doctrine granting permission for conceivable actions necessarily grants permission for every conceivable action, since all conceivable actions are conceivable. The department's reply, published as a broadside in the Annex of Replies and never withdrawn, is that the Concession grants nothing until something is done, at which point it grants exactly that and no more. This is widely regarded as an answer, though not universally as a satisfying one.

The Principle of Anticipatory Concession is distinct from the broader Doctrine of Anticipatory Resonance, with which it is frequently and incorrectly confused; the two share an interest in future events but no method, and the College has twice issued corrections. A visiting scholar who requested a tour of the department's correspondence was permitted to read anything she liked, provided she read it in the order it had been filed rather than the order written. She declined.