Committee for Latent Jurisprudence

The Committee for Latent Jurisprudence is a standing deliberative body of the Theoretical Jurisprudence Guild, constituted to consider questions of law that have not yet arisen but which the Committee holds to be already present in the statutes, awaiting only an occasion. It occupies the eastern annex of the Jurisprudence Stacks on floor 1,431 and has met, by its own reckoning, on every second Thursday since its founding under Seventh Concordance, Annex 9, though its minute-books record only eleven sittings, the remaining entries having been ruled "held in anticipation" and therefore not requiring transcription.

The Committee is frequently confused with the Committee for Ontological Review, with which it shares a corridor and a stationer. The distinction is maintained firmly by both bodies: the Committee for Ontological Review determines whether a thing may be said to exist, while the Committee for Latent Jurisprudence determines what the law would be if it did. Clerks are advised not to deliver papers to the wrong door. The corridor is not signposted, by longstanding arrangement.

Origin and the question of the empty docket

The Committee was created to resolve an embarrassment in the wake of Latent Intent jurisprudence. Following the success of V. Selvage in establishing that intention could attach to a party who had formed none, the Guild found itself in possession of a doctrine with no corresponding forum. Latent culpability could be assigned; it could not be heard. Seventh Concordance, Annex 9 supplied the deficiency by erecting a committee empowered to hear matters "in the absence of the facts giving rise to them, such absence being no bar."

The first docket was accordingly empty, and remained so for sixty-one years. The Committee's founding chair, Adjunct-Archivist H. Perrow, ruled in his opening address that an empty docket was "the fullest possible docket, and the only one on which no error can be made" (Address to the Constituting Committee, 9th sitting). This position was never formally overturned, and the Committee has since treated the absence of business as evidence of correct procedure.

Procedure

The Committee hears no evidence and calls no witnesses, on the reasoning that a witness to an event that has not occurred would be testifying to nothing, which the Guild's standing orders prohibit as a waste of the record. Instead, a matter is laid before the Committee as a statement of the case to come: a single paragraph, in the subjunctive, describing a dispute that might plausibly arise. The Committee then determines the law applicable to it, seals the determination in the annexe strongbox, and takes no further step. Determinations are opened only if the dispute subsequently occurs, at which point the Committee is required to establish that the prediction was correct and, if it was not, to amend the record without remark.

Of the four hundred and six determinations sealed since 1,204, none has been opened. The Committee regards this as a vindication. The Committee for Non-Intersecting Jurisdictions has twice requested access to the strongbox and been refused on the grounds that opening it would be an intersection.

"A question not yet asked is not the same as a question not yet answerable; the Committee is concerned only with the second, and finds in practice that the two are separated by a door that opens from one side."

— Descriptive Jurisprudence, §14 (c)

Jurisdictional dispute with the Sub-Committee for Dormancy Integrity

The Committee's most sustained quarrel concerns the Sub-Committee for Dormancy Integrity, which maintains that a superseded clause retains latent authority in unforeseen situations. The overlap is plain: both bodies claim authority over law that is present but inactive. The Sub-Committee holds that dormancy is a property of the clause; the Committee holds that latency is a property of the question. In the winter of 1,388 the two bodies issued contrary determinations on the same unstated dispute — the Sub-Committee finding that an old provision on stairwell width revived, the Committee finding that no such provision could apply because the dispute had not occurred — and both determinations were sealed, unopened, and remain unreconciled.

The Committee for Sustained Illumination was invited to arbitrate on the strength of its oversight of latent associations. It declined, noting that its competence extends to associations already illumined and not to those merely possible, a distinction the Committee for Latent Jurisprudence has never accepted.

The Doctrine of Latent Integrity and the problem of the missing chair

The Committee upholds the Doctrine of Latent Integrity in its strictest form, holding that a legal instrument is entire before it is drafted. This has produced a difficulty of some delicacy. The chair's seat has been vacant since 1,402, when the previous incumbent, Clerk M. Ossea, was discovered never to have been appointed — her warrant had been drafted, sealed, and filed, but the appointment itself was held to be prospective and had not yet fallen due. Ossea had presided for nineteen years. Rather than disturb the determinations made in that period, the Committee ruled that her authority had been latent throughout and would vest on a date it declined to specify. The seat remains vacant; the Committee continues to sit; Ossea's papers continue to be filed under her name, and she continues, in a manner the Guild does not discuss, to countersign them.

The episode is taught in the Guild's introductory course as an example of the doctrine operating correctly, and in its advanced course as an example of the doctrine operating.

Holdings and access

The Committee's determinations are catalogued in a separate register from the Annals of Jurisprudence, which the Guild has ruled "would otherwise be extended by volumes describing nothing." Readers wishing to consult the register should note that it is not held at the annexe but at the west counter of the Jurisprudence Stacks, third window, and that the register is legible only to those who have not previously asked to see it. Enquiries are entered in a ledger and answered in the order in which they were anticipated.

A short inventory of the annexe, renewed each cycle by the stationer:

• one table, eleven chairs (twelve appointed)
• four hundred and six sealed determinations, unopened
• one strongbox, keys mislaid
• nineteen years of minutes, unattributed
• one door, which is not to be propped open