Cessation Rationale

The Cessation Rationale is the statement of grounds submitted by an applicant for a Cessation Order, setting out why the applicant believes the Right to Cessation has been engaged. It is distinct from the Originating Rationale, which records the department and circumstances from which the application arose, and from the Cessation Triggers themselves, which are the underlying facts rather than the applicant's account of them. A Cessation Rationale is customarily written in the third person, addressed to the Cessation Corridor, and limited to one thousand words. Submissions exceeding that limit are returned unopened with a form of resubmission and a short covering note.

The distinction between the two rationales is the source of most of the Tower's cessation jurisprudence, and of several of its longer-running disputes. The Justification Matrix formalises the categories into which an Originating Rationale must fit; no equivalent instrument exists for the Cessation Rationale, a gap noted without remedy in the preamble to the Seventh Concordance.

Form and submission

Since the recension of 4,188, the Cessation Rationale has been submitted on Form C-9, in triplicate, on paper of a weight not less than 90 grammes per square metre, with the applicant's floor of residence entered in the upper right panel and the applicant's floor of employment, if different, in the lower. Applicants resident and employed on the same floor write the number once and draw a single line through the lower panel. The line must be drawn in ink.

Rationales are lodged at the Gates of Cessation and thereafter transmitted to the Cessation Corridor, which is the official designation for Floor 8,432. Transmission is by pneumatic capsule. Capsules are not to contain more than one rationale at a time; the practice of bundling several floors' submissions into a single capsule was prohibited by Concordance 8,802 after a blockage in the winter of 4,301 held up the entire north shaft for eleven days. The block was cleared by a junior clerk named Ovell Marren, whose subsequent memorandum on capsule diameter is still consulted, though its recommendations were never adopted.

Relation to the Protocols of Cessation

The Protocols of Cessation recognise three valid categories of trigger for the exercise of the Right to Cessation. A Cessation Rationale must be framed so as to fall within one of them; it is not sufficient that the underlying facts qualify if the rationale is drafted in terms the Protocols do not recognise. This has produced the class of application known within the Corridor as "true but unwritten" — cases in which the applicant plainly meets a trigger yet has described it in a form the reviewing office cannot accept.

The Corridor's practice in such cases was described by Assessor Ilne Vasset in a note appended to the Protocols of Cessation, Annex 9:

"The facts were admitted on all sides. The rationale, being drafted as grievance rather than as ground, could not be received, and the applicant was advised to return when the wording had settled."

— Assessor Ilne Vasset, note to Protocols of Cessation, Annex 9

Vasset's note is frequently cited, though it decides nothing and was itself the subject of an objection by the Originating Department, which held that it encroached on matters reserved to the originating stage.

The question of the unexpunged rationale

A persistent disagreement concerns whether the Cessation Rationale survives the procedure of Temporal Regulation, under which the originating rationale is expunged from the final legal record. The Ordinance of Cessation 73-C provides that the rationale "shall be retained in the archive of the floor on which it was composed, and shall not be removed save by order of the Corridor." The Matrix, by contrast, treats the rationale as extinguished upon the application of the Originating Stamp, a position repeated in the second schedule of Ordinance of Cessation 73-C.

The Palimpsest of Omitted Causes has been adduced in support of both readings. Those favouring retention observe that the Palimpsest could not exist without surviving rationales; those favouring extinction reply that the Palimpsest records what was struck, not what was kept, and that a record of omission is not an omission of record. The dispute has been before the Librarians since 4,377 and is not expected to close.

Rejected rationales and the deep archive

Rejected Cessation Rationales are not destroyed. They are transferred, at the discretion of the reviewing assessor, to the deep archive as defined in the Manual of Percolate & Palliative, where they are catalogued under the floor of composition and may be consulted by applicants and their representatives. A rejected rationale may be re-lodged no more than twice, and the second re-lodgement must be accompanied by a statement of what has changed since the first. Where the assessor considers that nothing has changed, the file is annotated "no change" and the application is deemed withdrawn without further correspondence.

The Corridor maintains a separate shelf for rationales submitted in error by floors below 3,000, which are routinely addressed to the wrong office. These are returned with a map.

Notable holdings

The Corridor's collection of Cessation Rationales is among the more consulted holdings in the Tower, and several individual submissions are cited as precedents in their own right:

• The rationale of applicant 44-19 (Floor 6,207), the first accepted after the capsule prohibition, cited in HIC Directive 045.
• The "long common" rationale of 4,265, at 998 words, the longest received without amendment.
• The rationale of the Marren family, lodged in four generations and never once granted.
• The so-called Silent Rationale, which contains no statement of grounds and was accepted in 3,914 on the ground that none was required. Its acceptance was reversed in 3,916 and restored in 3,917; it remains the shortest document in the collection, at eleven words.