Approval Authority

Approval Authority is the class of delegated power by which an officer, body, or instrument of the Tower converts a proposal into an operative act. It is distinguished from advisory authority, which produces recommendations, and from Conditional Authority, which produces acts that lapse unless renewed. An exercise of Approval Authority is complete at the moment of signature or seal; it is not divisible, not retroactive, and — per Third Concordance, Clause 12 — not transferable except under Provisional Authority Transfer.

Approval Authority is the operative mechanism behind nearly every formal act in the Tower. The Warden of Descent holds it over Proposed Descent Particulars; the Archon holds it over the Assumption of Merit; the Seal-Wardens hold it over Chamber Sealings; the Office of Catalogic Logistics holds it over The Movement of Stacks. In each case the form of the authority is identical and only the subject matter differs.

Doctrine of delegated approval

The governing principle, stated in the Ordinance of Delegated Approval (Concordance 114, as amended nine times), is that Approval Authority descends from the Librarians and is held in trust, never in ownership. A holder may approve; a holder may not approve the approval. This prohibition on second-order approval is the origin of the long dispute over Petitions of Recursive Authority, in which petitioners argue that submission of the petition itself exercises the very authority the petition seeks. The Court of Silenced Appeals has declined to resolve the question four times, most recently in the matter of Aperture Delta, holding only that the Court "is not the proper forum for a question the petitioner has already answered."

Holders of Approval Authority are recorded in the Roll of Approving Officers, maintained continuously since the 400s. The Roll lists 2,116 names, of which 314 are marked with a violet asterisk indicating that the officer's approvals remain valid posthumously — a status conferred by the Archon alone.

Instruments and marks

Approval is rendered by one of three instruments: the plain seal, the counter-seal, and the Sphygmomanometer of Authority. The first two are conventional. The third, used principally by the Curatorial Council in Static Retention matters, records approval as a pressure reading; readings below 40 millimetres of mercury are void, and the instrument is recalibrated each Quinquennial Adjustment against the Standard Mass of the Ninth Landing.

Time and lapse

Approval Authority may be exercised only within the Aperture of Exercise, the interval between the filing of a proposal and the closing of the receiving desk on the same floor. Because floors are not numbered sequentially (see Floor Numbering Irregularity), the Aperture of Exercise on Floor 7-Aleph opens eleven hours before it is filed and on Floor 7-Bet three days after. The Office of Temporal Reconciliation has ruled that both are correct.

An approval not exercised within the Aperture lapses into Provenant Authority, a residual category permitting the holder to certify only that approval could have been given. Provenant certifications are accepted by most desks and rejected by the Ratification Quorum, which requires the act itself.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal dispute concerns whether Approval Authority inheres in the office or in the person. The Twelfth Concordance holds that authority attaches to the seat: where an officer is absent, the seat may approve by proxy, and the proxy need not be named. The Nineteenth Concordance holds the opposite, that authority attaches to the named holder, and that an unnamed proxy's approvals are "of no catalogic weight."

The contradiction is not merely academic. In the Matter of the Unnamed Proxy (Floor 1,140, recorded 6 March, year unrecorded), 41 approvals were issued by proxy during a vacancy in the Seal-Wardenship. The West Spiral Repository accepted 40 of them as valid and moved the forty-first to the negated records, producing a single record that is simultaneously held and not held — a condition the Repository describes, without further comment, as "pending."

"An approval is a door. It matters little who opened it, provided the hinge was the Tower's."

— Nineteenth Concordance, marginal gloss, hand unknown

The Concordance Revision Committee has had the question of proxy approval on its agenda since Concordance 214 and has not voted. Its minutes record the item each session as "carried forward, unopposed."

See also

• Authority Attestation
• Principle of Ephemeral Authority
• Applications of Authority
• Register of Lapsed Approvals