Committee Review

Definition and scope

Committee Review is the general designation for any review conducted under the authority of a committee of the Tower, as distinct from a review conducted of a committee. The distinction was first drawn in Cycle 31 by the Committee of Permanent Review, in a ruling intended to settle a dispute between two clerks of the Office of Cyclical Review who had each believed the other's file to be redundant. The ruling succeeded in settling the dispute and in creating three further categories of review that had not previously existed.

Committee Review is not itself a body. It is a class of proceeding, and like most classes in the Tower it is administered by an office that was named for something else. Proceedings falling under this heading are recorded in the Determinative Reports and are cited by cycle number, sub-number, and — since the amendment of the Fourth Concordance — the surname of the reviewing clerk, which had previously been omitted on the grounds that clerks do not have surnames.

Constitution

A Committee Review is constituted when a committee of sufficient standing convenes to examine a matter falling within its own declared jurisdiction. Where the matter falls within the jurisdiction of a different committee, the proceeding is instead an Intersecting Review and is referred to the Committee for Non-Intersecting Jurisdictions, whose entire caseload consists of matters that, by definition, cannot reach it. This arrangement has been in place since the Ninth Concordance and has produced no determinations to date, a fact the Committee regards as proof of its efficacy.

The Committee for Ontological Review holds that Committee Review proper may only be conducted on facts, and that reviews of fictions, presumptions, and provisional standings must proceed under Ontological Review instead. The two proceedings are frequently confused because they are conducted in the same room, by the same clerks, with the same forms. The difference lies in the colour of the seal affixed to the completed file: red for Committee Review, ochre for Ontological Review, and, in the case of files that have been amended more than nine times, no seal at all.

Procedural notes

Reviews are ordinarily conducted in batches, with a single sitting addressing between four and eleven matters. Sittings exceeding eleven matters require the presence of a second clerk, a provision introduced after the incident on Floor 214 in the winter of Cycle 27, during which a single clerk reviewed thirty-one matters in one afternoon and signed each with increasing conviction. The resulting determinations were so internally consistent that they were not overturned until Cycle 29, by which point four floors had been reclassified.

Where a Committee Review produces a finding that contradicts an earlier finding of the same committee, the earlier finding is not voided. Both are recorded, and the contradiction is noted in the margin. The margin note is itself a record, and may be reviewed. It has been reviewed.

"A review that resolves nothing has still been conducted; a review that resolves something must be conducted again to determine whether the resolution was in scope."

— Fifth Concordance, Annex 7

Jurisdictional disputes

The principal disagreement concerns the boundary between Committee Review and Sealing Committee Review. The Committee for Ontological Review holds that a sealing committee is a committee like any other and that its reviews therefore fall under the same heading. The Sealing Committee Review maintains, with some force, that its proceedings are sealed precisely because they are not reviews in the ordinary sense, and that to subject them to Committee Review would be to unseal them by procedure rather than by order. This dispute is currently before the Committee for Ontological Hygiene, which has scheduled a preliminary hearing for a cycle that has not yet been assigned a number.

A secondary disagreement, older and quieter, concerns whether Committee Review extends to matters of spatial or custodial character. The Review of Floor Stability conducts its work under a charter that predates the general heading and has never acknowledged it. Similarly, the Custodial Strain Review holds that its reviews are of a physical rather than a deliberative nature, and that no committee convenes them — they simply occur, and are recorded afterwards. The Office of Supersession Review has twice attempted to fold both proceedings into the general category and twice had its amendments returned unmarked.

Records and citation

Completed Committee Review files are held in the annexes adjacent to the reviewing committee's chamber. Files older than nine cycles are transferred to the general stacks, where they are indexed by matter rather than by committee, a practice the Office of Cyclical Review has described as "archival hygiene" and the affected committees have described as "loss."

Citations of Committee Review proceedings should specify the committee, the cycle, the sub-number, and the seal colour where known. Incomplete citations are a common source of dispute; a matter frequently cited as having been "settled under Committee Review, Cycle 24" has since been shown to belong to three different proceedings, only one of which was conducted by a committee at all. The remaining two are under review.

Readers seeking a determination on whether a given proceeding constitutes Committee Review should consult the Sub-committee on Lexical Integrity, which maintains the current list of qualifying designations. The list is amended whenever a new designation is proposed and is, by its own terms, always one amendment behind.