Court of Necessary Adjustments

The Court of Necessary Adjustments is a standing tribunal of the Judiciary of Cross-Reference, constituted to hear petitions in which a record, having been found correct, is nonetheless found to require alteration. It sits on Spiral 41 in chambers formerly occupied by the Bureau of Unclaimed Attributions, whose furnishings it inherited in full and has never replaced. Its seal is a set of scales with both pans removed.

The Court does not decide whether a thing should change. It decides whether the change was necessary, and it decides this after the change has occurred. Practitioners describe the distinction as the whole of the Court's usefulness and most of its difficulty.

Origin

The Court was created by the Ninth Concordance, Annex 9, following the Affair of the Misnumbered Stairwell, in which a flight on Spiral 41 was renumbered three times in a single winter (the winters of the Tower are counted, not dated; this was the winter of the 1,112th Inventory). Each renumbering was lawful. Each renumbering rendered the previous notice unlawful. By the third, four hundred and six residents were ascending a stair that the record stated did not exist, and the Committee of Necessary Splits declined to divide the dispute on the grounds that both halves would have been identical.

The Annex established a court empowered to rule retroactively that an adjustment had been necessary, thereby making the sequence of lawful acts lawful in aggregate. The first presiding Librarian, Ovin Marrand, is recorded as having opened the inaugural session with the observation that the Court had been asked "to certify that water was wet before it was poured." The remark is preserved in the session minutes and has been cited in dissent fourteen times.

Procedure

A petition is filed on Form NA-3, which requires the petitioner to state the adjustment, the date of the adjustment, and the date on which the petitioner first noticed it. The third field is, by convention, left approximate. The Court has ruled that an approximate notice date does not invalidate a petition, provided the petitioner can name the floor on which they were standing (Precedent Omega745, applied by extension).

Hearings are held in the absence of the thing adjusted. The Court has held since Precedent Omega7 45 that the presence of the subject introduces an adjustment of its own, and that the Court cannot rule on a change while causing one. Petitioners therefore speak of the adjusted object in the past tense throughout, which visiting parties frequently find unnerving. The clerk of the Court keeps a small wooden tray of household objects — a cup, a key, a length of cord — which petitioners may indicate when they cannot find words.

Rulings take one of three forms: Necessary, Necessary in Part, and Regrettably Necessary. The third form carries no legal distinction from the first and is issued when the Court wishes the record to show that it noticed.

Jurisdictional disputes

The Court's authority overlaps uncomfortably with that of the Court of Unseen Precedents, which may overturn a Standing Precedent without adjusting anything, and with the Court of Silenced Appeals, whose annex on Spiral 94 hears appeals from rulings that were never spoken aloud. Where an adjustment was made in silence and then certified, both courts have claimed the matter. The Committee on Jurisdictional Overlap has heard the question twice and referred it once to the Third Concordant Court, which returned it unopened with a note reading only "Not ours. Ours were opened."

A separate and unresolved difficulty concerns the Court of Coincidental Intent, which holds that an adjustment made by accident is not an adjustment at all but a coincidence with consequences. The Court of Necessary Adjustments has never accepted this, but has also never ruled against it directly, preferring to describe such matters in its judgments as "outside the Court's necessary interest."

Scholarly disagreement

The principal dispute in the Court's literature concerns whether a Necessary ruling can precede the adjustment it concerns. The Fourth Concordance, Annex 12, implies that it can, and that the Court's retroactivity is in fact a formality of drafting. The Eleventh Concordance contradicts this flatly at clause 3, holding that a necessity determined in advance is a prediction, and that the Court is not empowered to predict.

Librarian Hessaly Vorn, in her Commentary on the Adjustments, Vol. II, argues that both readings are correct and that the Court simply rules twice, once before and once after, without recording the first. The Court has neither confirmed nor denied this. Its own procedural handbook, the Handbook, notes at section 14 that "the Court's records are complete," which has been read by every party to the dispute as supporting their position.

Notable rulings

In In re: The Whispering Mall Food Court, the Court ruled Regrettably Necessary on the relocation of eleven vendor stalls, having found that the stalls had been correctly placed both before and after. In Resolution of the Mis-shelved Tomes, it declined jurisdiction, observing that mis-shelving is a condition rather than an adjustment, and that a condition, however prolonged, does not become an event merely by being complained of.

Its longest hearing, spanning four sessions across the Great Pneumatic Tube Network dispute, concerned a single capsule routed through a corrected junction. The Court found the correction necessary, the routing necessary, and the capsule's arrival necessary, and issued a certificate to that effect which the Network has since framed.

Visitors are admitted to the public gallery on Spiral 41 by written request. Hats are removed at the door and returned at the conclusion of proceedings, which is the only point at which the Court permits an object to change hands in its presence.