Contestation of Primacy

The Contestation of Primacy is the formal procedure by which a filed Assertion of Primacy is disputed before it takes effect. It is distinct from Contestation in general, which concerns holdings and ordinances; the Contestation of Primacy concerns only the ranking of authorities, and is the sole mechanism by which a claim of precedence may be examined before it is entered in the Registry of Precedence on Floor 2,204. The procedure is governed jointly by the Third Concordance and the Eleventh Concordance, which agree on its instigation and on almost nothing thereafter.

Origin and the Axiom

The procedure descends from the Primacy School's early practice of testing its own filings before submission, a habit recorded in Ellere's On Procedural Primacy (381 SC) as "the courtesy of doubting oneself first" (Ellere, On Procedural Primacy, ch. 9). Concordance 198-D later made the School's arbitration of primacy conflicts a duty rather than a courtesy, and the Contestation of Primacy is the form that duty takes when a filing is challenged rather than merely reviewed.

The Primacy of Form supplies the substantive test. A filing may be contested on the ground that the form invoked is not the form filed under — a distinction that sounds trivial and has occupied the Glossarial Stream for one hundred and forty years. Where the form holds, the contestation fails; where it does not, the filing is returned to the filer with the seal struck through in red, which filers find more distressing than outright refusal.

Instigation

Formal instigation follows the protocols established for Contestation generally, as set out in the Third Concordance and, in a recension disputed at three points, the Eleventh Concordance. A contestation is initiated by lodging a Filing of Contradiction with the Review Chamber, naming the Assertion, the ground of dispute, and — this is the requirement most often missed — the floor on which the claimant first read the Assertion. Claims without a floor number are held at the intake desk until the claimant returns with one. The desk will not supply a floor number.

The Primacy of Preservation operates as an absolute bar. No Assertion touching on preservation may be contested at all, and the Chamber's clerks are instructed to return such filings unopened; Concordance 198-D, Annex 3, provides that "the Preservation is not ranked, and therefore may not be ranked against" (Concordance 198-D, Annex 3). Whether the bar is jurisdictional or merely evidentiary is the substance of the Echo Primacy Debate, which has now run long enough that both positions are cited as settled.

The winter of 611

The procedure's modern form follows the collapse of the great contestation of 611 SC, when eleven simultaneous contestations were lodged against a single Assertion advanced by the School of Material Primacy. Each contestation was valid. Each named a different ground. The Review Chamber, then occupying two rooms on Floor 1,188 while its own chamber was being refloored, heard them in the order the papers came to hand, which was the order in which a clerk named Havers had stacked them, which was by weight.

"The Chamber finds the first contestation good and the remaining ten good also, and observes that it can act on only one, and asks the claimants to decide among themselves which. The claimants did not. The Chamber adjourned."

— Review Chamber, Minute of 14 Frost, 611 SC

Havers's stack was subsequently bound and deposited on Floor 1,188 as a record of the proceeding, and is consulted more often than the minute. The Third Concordance was amended the following year to require that simultaneous contestations be consolidated under the earliest seal, a rule the Eleventh Concordance had contained since its own promulgation and which the Third had previously described, in Annex 7, as "a practice proper to the lower floors" (Third Concordance, Annex 7).

Conduct of the contestation

The Chamber sits for contestations on the second and fourth Ascensions of each month. The claimant speaks first, then the filer, then the Glossarial Stream delivers its annotation on any term in dispute — a stage that in practice concludes the matter, since the Stream's annotations are definitive and are amended only by further annotation. The average contestation is resolved in four sittings; the longest on record, concerning the Principle of Contextual Primacy, occupied nineteen years and was resolved when the claimant died and his heir declined to continue, which the Chamber recorded as a withdrawal.

Appeals lie to the Primacy School under Concordance 198-D. Appeals of appeals lie nowhere, though they are filed at a steady rate of some forty a year and are retained, stamped, and shelved on Floor 2,205, where they may be read by anyone who can produce a floor number for the original filing.

Relation to other primacies

The Contestation of Primacy is sometimes invoked against Acoustic Primacy, Textual Primacy, and the Principle of Derivative Primacy, though in each case the contestation is properly a contestation of the Assertion that cites them rather than of the doctrine itself. The distinction was set out at length in the Factualist Chapter's response to the Echo Primacy Debate and has been observed since, except on Floor 1,188.

A contestation does not suspend the Assertion unless the Chamber so orders, and the Chamber orders suspension rarely — nine times since 611 SC. Of these, four suspensions were later found to have been entered in error and were annotated rather than reversed, the Registry being unwilling to strike an entry once sealed. The Principle of Contextual Primacy and the Primacy of Instrument vs. Observation have each been the subject of one such annotating suspension. Filers are advised to bring their own sealing wax; the Chamber's supply has been short since the reflooring.