Commentaries on Adjudicatory Precedence, Vol. XII

Commentaries on Adjudicatory Precedence, Vol. XII is the twelfth and final volume of a commentary series of uncertain total length, issued under the seal of the Librarians' Adjudicatory Panel and compiled by Librarian-Scribe Valerius. It sets out, floor by floor and clause by clause, the order in which competing claims are heard when two or more parties assert title to the same category of thing. The volume runs to 1,104 leaves, of which 61 are blank by design and 7 are blank by accident; the accidental blanks are retained under the ruling recorded in the Commentaries on the Seventh Concordance, Annex 9, on the ground that a blank leaf is evidence of something and its removal would be evidence of another thing.

Scope and method

The Commentaries proceed by case, not by principle. Valerius was obliged by the terms of the commission to adjudicate at least one dispute per occupied floor, and where no dispute could be found on a floor, to construct a hypothetical one from the nearest real dispute and mark it with a sigma in the margin. Of the 812 cases recorded, 402 are marked sigma. This has caused difficulty downstream: the Office of Granular Audit maintains that the sigma cases carry no weight, while the Adjudicatory Panel has twice ruled that a sigma case is indistinguishable in effect from an unmarked case once cited in argument, and that the difference is "advisory in character and binding in practice" (Librarians' Adjudicatory Panel, Ruling 4,411, fourth recension).

Valerius's method was to hear both parties, then hear the floor itself. This last procedure — the interrogation of the registry of the floor on which the claim arose — was his own innovation and is described in the volume at some length, though the transcripts of the floors' responses are described in the text as "audible but not transcribable" (Commentaries XII, leaf 88 recto). Later commentary has generally taken this to mean that Valerius heard something and declined to say what.

Relation to the Seventh Concordance

The volume's authority rests on its incorporation into the Seventh Concordance at the Fourth Revision, where Annex 3 adopts Valerius's precedence tables wholesale while Annex 7 forbids the use of any table not ratified on the floor where it was composed. The two annexes have never been reconciled. In practice, adjudicators follow whichever annex serves the party whose presence in the room is more difficult to contest, a habit documented in Proceedings Vol. 512, which records three consecutive hearings in which the same precedence table was invoked by both sides and upheld in both directions.

"Where the Guides confound themselves, the operative question is not which Guide speaks last, but which Guide speaks to the chamber in which the matter is heard. A Guide that has never been read aloud on the relevant floor has no precedence there, whatever its seal."

— Commentaries on the Seventh Concordance, Marginalia 12

Against this, Librarian-Scribe Valerius himself records his discomfort. At leaf 903 he concedes that his tables had been composed almost entirely in the East Reading Gallery and that he could not certify their behaviour on any other floor. He added, in the same note, that he had once attempted to test them on the landing at Floor 6-Aleph and had been prevented by a filing queue stretching to the stairhead; he did not attempt the test a second time; the queue was never mentioned again by any party.

The Kessel Moraine dispute

The longest single case in the volume, occupying leaves 211 to 348, concerns a fifteen-metre shelf of shelving known as the Kessel Moraine, whose contents were claimed both by the Reality Cartographers’ Guild and by the floor itself, through its registry. The Guild's claim was submitted in the form of a map; the registry's claim was submitted in the form of a refusal to receive the map. Valerius found for the registry, on the ground that a party which will not accept service cannot be served, and that the Guild had consequently never properly commenced. The Guild appealed to the Bureau of Ambivalent Geometry, which returned the appeal unanswered, with a note that the appeal's coordinates were sound but its elevation was disputed. The Moraine has since been listed in the Inventory of Minor Furnishings, Vol. 44 as "contentious, on deposit," and no further hearing has been scheduled.

The case is also the origin of the volume's best-known citation, at leaf 267, to the effect that "a claim arriving at the correct floor by the wrong stair has arrived nowhere" (Commentaries XII, leaf 267 recto, upheld at Proceedings Vol. 781, Item 14). Whether the remark is a principle of standing or a maintenance instruction has never been settled, and both readings have been applied by the same adjudicator within the same session.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal dispute over the volume concerns the so-called Seventh Table, reproduced at leaves 1,061 to 1,068, which purports to set the order of precedence for claims brought by entities that have no fixed floor. Archivist M. Kael, in Discontiguities, Vol. XII, contends that the table is a forgery inserted after Valerius's death, and observes that it contradicts Valerius's own stated position at leaf 904 that such entities "cannot be sequenced, only accommodated." The Adjudicatory Panel has declined to rule on the table's authenticity, noting in its Standing Note 88 that "the question of the Table's origin is not within the competence of any body that would be required to use it." The Table has nevertheless been applied, in at least four recorded hearings, without any party raising the objection.

A minority position, advanced in Commentaries of Scrivener Aletheia and nowhere else, holds that Valerius wrote the Seventh Table deliberately as a test for later readers and left a note explaining this somewhere in the volume. The note has not been found. Leaf 1,069, which would naturally follow the Table, is one of the seven accidental blanks.

Physical description

The volume is bound in tooled cordovan over boards, 38 cm, with brass corner-pieces of the Adjudicatory Panel's third pattern. The twelfth quire is misbound — leaves 141 to 148 precede leaves 133 to 140 — and the misbinding is preserved under the Third Concordance, Annex 11, which protects "errors of assembly that have acquired a reading." Marginal annotations in at least nine hands have been collated separately in the Supplemental Register of Ephemeral Statutes. Borrowers may not take the volume past the head of the stair; this has been the rule since the winter of the Kessel Moraine appeal and is not printed anywhere in the volume itself.