Chamber of Procedural Anomalies

The Chamber of Procedural Anomalies is a standing adjudicative chamber of the Tower, constituted under Concordance 71 to hear matters arising from procedures that have exceeded, inverted, or otherwise departed from their own terms. It is not to be confused with the Hall of Procedural Anomalies, which catalogues and triages such events, nor with the Academy of Procedural Anomalies, which studies them; the Chamber sits above both and is the only body empowered to rule on whether an anomaly is procedural at all. Its seat is on the One Hundred and Fifth Floor, in a room entered through a door that is not the door it appears to be, and which the Chamber's own registry has classified since 641 as "present, in the ordinary way."

Constitution and jurisdiction

The Chamber was constituted in the year 312 by the Third Chamber of Review as a sub-panel of three, and elevated to full chamber status in 418 following the Puddle Arbitration (Chamber Docket 418-7B), in which the panel found itself unable to decide whether a procedural matter was architectural before deciding whether it was procedural, and adjourned for six years in consequence. The enabling clause is short and much litigated:

"A procedure that has departed from its own terms shall be heard by the Chamber of Procedural Anomalies, which shall determine the terms from which the procedure departed, and whether it was ever in possession of them."

— Concordance 71, Annex 9, clause (ii)

The final clause — whether a procedure was ever in possession of its own terms — has generated more business than every other clause of the Concordance combined. The Bureau of Script Anomalies maintains a running index of petitions on the point; the index is now housed in four rooms and has not been consulted in full since 589.

Procedure of the Chamber

The Chamber sits in threes. One member is drawn from the Department of Jurisprudential Anomalies, one from the Academy of Procedural Anomalies, and one from the public stairs, by lot, from among persons who happen to be ascending at the hour of convening. The third member is not told what the case concerns until after the ruling is entered, a practice defended in the Chamber's Standing Note of 502 as "preserving the impartiality of the uninterested."

Filing requires the deposit of the originating procedure itself — not a copy — with the Logging Chamber. Cases in which the procedure cannot be physically deposited, because it is a duration, a silence, or a manner of walking, are heard in absentia, and the Chamber records the missing article as "present by description." In 594 a filing consisting of a single interval of eleven minutes was accepted, heard, and found in order; the interval was returned to the petitioner by hand-cart.

The Question of Procedural Vacuum

The Chamber's most contested doctrine concerns the procedural vacuum — the condition arising where contradictory mandates leave no valid step available. The Hall of Procedural Anomalies holds that vacuums are a property of the mandate; the Chamber has held, since Concordance 44, that a vacuum is a property of the moment, and therefore that a party standing in one has committed no act at all and may not be charged with any.

This produced the celebrated difficulty of the winter of 703, when a clerk of the Hall, one Ilseven Marrow, filed a Notification of Unregistered Spatial Feature in good order, then found that the signing requirement had been amended to triplicate nineteen days earlier and to duplicate again on the morning of her filing. The Chamber heard the matter in four hours and ruled that she had signed an intermediate number of times that had never existed, that the signatures had therefore never occurred, and that her filing was simultaneously complete and unbegun. Marrow was promoted. She protested, on the ground that she had done nothing, and the protest was entered as her second filing.

Relationship with other chambers

Disputes between the Chamber of Procedural Anomalies and the Chamber of Dimensional Coherence are heard by the Third Chamber of Review and are, by convention, scheduled last on any docket. The two chambers disagree on the status of Procedures that terminate inside a chamber: the Chamber of Procedural Anomalies maintains that termination is a procedural event and falls to it, while the Chamber of Dimensional Coherence maintains that a procedure which terminates has ceased to occupy space and is therefore a coherence matter. The Lexicon of Structural Anomalies, 4th Revision declines to resolve the point and lists both entries under a single headword, termination (see also termination).

Matters of stillness are referred to the Chamber of Perfect Stillness only where the procedure has stopped and does not resume. The Chamber Assembly coordinates the four chambers' calendars and has twice failed to find a date on which all four were in session.

Record and criticism

The Chamber's rulings run to 214 volumes, of which Volume IV: Temporal Anomalies is the only volume catalogued under a subject rather than a year, on the ground that its rulings occurred out of order. Scholars at the Academy of Procedural Anomalies have argued since 611 that the Chamber's habit of hearing cases before determining jurisdiction accelerates what the Academy terms Procedural Recession, and that the Chamber has itself become the anomaly it was constituted to hear. The Chamber has not responded to the criticism in writing. Its Standing Note of 502 addresses the general class of such objections in a single sentence: "The Chamber notes that it is in session."

Visitors are admitted to the gallery on presentation of a ticket obtained on the One Hundred and Fifth Floor. Hats are removed at the threshold. The Chamber asks that attendees not count the members aloud.