Authority of Precedent

Authority of Precedent is the practice, commissioned under Precedent 22-, by which rulings issued within the administrative strata of The Tower acquire binding force through the fact of their having been issued. The practice is foundational to administrative and judicial action in those strata. It is governed, in its interpretive aspect, by the Judicial Precedent Guild, and it is the operative principle behind every holding archived at the Hall of Administrative Precedent. It should not be confused with the body of the same name, a distinction the Guild has declined to clarify.

Origin and commission

Precedent 22- did not create the Authority of Precedent so much as discover it in operation and assign it a desk. The document commissions the practice and vests interpretive and promulgative power in designated bodies, of which the Judicial Precedent Guild is the oldest and the Adjudicators of Precedent the most litigated. Under the same instrument, 22- grants the Court of Unseen Precedents authority to designate Circulars of Precedent, a power the Court has exercised eleven times and explained on none of those occasions.

The Authority of Precedent also recognizes a second, older ground of force: power derived from continuous, uncontested exercise of function over a significant period. The Spiral of Administrative Precedent records that the "significant period" has been measured variously at forty years, one hundred years, and "the span of a working clerkship, generously counted" (Seventh Recension of the Spiral, folio 12v). No measurement has been invalidated.

Operation

In practice the Authority of Precedent does its work quietly. A ruling is issued, entered, and thereafter cited; citation begets citation; and a holding acquires weight in proportion to the number of later rulings that lean on it, which in turn lean on it more heavily for having weight. Librarians describe this as "the ledger that pays itself" — a phrase first recorded in a marginal note by the clerk Alder Munt, whose grievance against the practice is considered below.

The Authority also furnishes the mechanism of nullification, which severs a subject's connection to the foundational principles of the practice. Nullification is rare, permanent, and — by the terms of Concordance 88-B, Annex 2 — "not to be recorded in the ordinary hand." A subject nullified under the Authority retains no standing to cite, to be cited, or to be addressed by name in the Hall, though the Hall continues to shelve their rulings, because the alternative was found to be untidy.

The recursive question

The most persistent doctrinal difficulty of the Authority of Precedent is recursion. Clause 415 declares flatly that no precedent may cite, as its foundational authority, an act performed under the authority of that same precedent. The clause is clear. Its application is not.

The Crisis of the Unmoored Precedent arose from precisely this difficulty, when a chain of rulings was found to terminate, three links back, in an act performed under the authority of the first ruling in the chain. The Judicial Precedent Guild and the Adjudicators of Precedent disagree about the crisis's resolution. The Guild holds that Clause 415 was satisfied by the insertion of an intervening ruling of independent pedigree, and cites Ruling 4117-γ/Appellate in support. The Adjudicators maintain that the intervening ruling was itself drawn from the chain, and that the Guild's position "parses the knot without untying it" (Adjudicators' Memorandum on Recursive Authority, §7). The Adjudicators further argue that parsing without precedent is mere cutting, a formulation the Guild has adopted as a compliment without acknowledging its source.

Coincidental names and the Authority's body

A chronic ambiguity attaches to the practice's name. The Authority of Precedent, considered as a body, sits in the same rooms as the practice that commissions it, and its officers sign documents on behalf of the practice in the first person. Concordance 41-D provides that the practice and the body "shall be understood as one where convenient and as distinct where necessary." The following Concordance reverses the priority of the two cases. Both remain in force.

The Munt grievance and the visiting rule

In the winter of the year the Spiral was rebound, the clerk Alder Munt petitioned the Hall of Administrative Precedent for relief from a ruling that had cited, in support of itself, a copy of itself housed two floors below. The Hall denied the petition on the ground that Munt's petition was itself a precedent and had therefore been in force since filing. Munt's subsequent complaint to the Curators Guild is preserved and contains the most concise surviving statement of the practice's difficulty: "The Authority cannot be appealed to, because the appeal is already authority" (Munt, Complaint to the Curators, entry 4).

The Curators directed that Munt be reassigned to the Register of Essential Contiguities, where citation is not permitted, and that the ruling at issue be left undisturbed. Munt remained there until retirement and is reported to have been content.

Visitors to the Hall are asked not to cite anything until they have reached the second landing. The rule is posted at the first.

Related holdings

• Precedent Omega745 and its variant Precedent Omega7 45, whose divergence remains unexplained
• Cycle of Precedent, the seasonal schedule of citation
• Citation of Opposing Precedent, the sanctioned form
• Precedent Σ-12 and Precedent Γ-12/8, the two competing terminal authorities
• Precedent Curation, the maintenance of holdings no one may cite