Curia of Concordant Interpretation

The Curia of Concordant Interpretation is the standing chamber of the Office of Concordant Interpretation (OCI), convened to hear matters of interpretation that the Board of Concordant Interpretation has declined to hear itself. It is not a court of appeal; it has no jurisdiction above or below the Board, and its judgments are neither final nor, in a strict sense, advisory. The Curia occupies Rooms 14 through 22 of the Lamplight Landing, four floors below the Secondary Vestibules, and has convened there continuously since the winter of 1609, except for eleven days in 1611 following a fire in Room 17 that was never formally investigated.

Composition and seating

The Curia is chaired by a Superintendent of Ricordance, an office held by rotation among the senior Readers of the OCI. The present Superintendent, Vell of the Slow Exchange, took up the seat in 1641 after a contested election in which the ballot box was found to contain a majority of its own returns. The Curia meets with a quorum of nine, though the room seats fourteen and has never been fully occupied. Seating is by seniority measured in years of service, then by seniority measured in years of residence, then by height.

Members speak in sequence. The sequence is fixed at the start of each session by a draw from the Bowl of Precedence and is not changed mid-session for any reason, including the death of a member. Where a member dies mid-session, the seat is left empty and the draw stands. This has produced the so-called Hollow Seating of 1648, in which three seats went unfilled for six months and all questions put to them were returned unanswered but recorded.

Procedure

Matters reach the Curia by Notice of Contested Interpretation, the same instrument used to initiate Scholastic Disputes before the Board. The Curia's function is to determine whether a matter is properly a dispute at all. If it is, the Curia returns it to the Board with a finding of propriety. If it is not, the Curia returns it to the Board with a finding of impropriety. Either finding may be appealed, but only to the Curia.

"A finding of propriety does not commit the Board to hear the matter. A finding of impropriety does not release the Curia from having heard it."

— Concordance of Procedural Silence, Clause 9

This circularity is not generally considered a defect. The Office of Concordant Arbitration maintains that the Curia's double jurisdiction is the only thing preventing the Board from being overwhelmed by its own business, a claim the Board has neither confirmed nor disputed in writing. In practice the Curia disposes of roughly two hundred matters a year and leaves an estimated four hundred unresolved at the close of each session, on the principle that matters left open may be taken up again without new paperwork.

The Doctrine of the Second Reading

The Curia's most cited ruling is the Doctrine of the Second Reading, adopted in 1633, which holds that no instrument may be interpreted until it has been read twice by the same Reader, and that the second reading must occur no fewer than three days after the first. The doctrine was introduced by Reader Cassiline of the Ninth Landing following a dispute over the Clarification of Annex B, in which two Readers had reached opposite conclusions from the same text within the same hour.

Cassiline's argument, recorded in full in the Curia's minute book for the fourth session of 1633, was that the interval between readings permits the reader's attention to change without permitting the text to change, and that interpretation is the reconciliation of those two facts. The doctrine has since been extended to the reading of the doctrine itself, producing a delay of roughly nine days before any question of interpretation can be formally raised.

Dispute with the Board

The Curia's authority rests on the Third Concordance, Annex 4, which assigns it "all matters of interpretation arising in chambers," a phrase whose scope has been disputed since the ink was wet. The Board of Concordant Interpretation has argued in the Seventy-Seventh Clarification that "arising in chambers" refers only to matters originating in the Curia's own rooms, and that the Curia has therefore no jurisdiction over matters reaching it from elsewhere. The Curia has declined to accept this reading, noting that if the phrase were so construed the Curia would have nothing to do, and that a chamber with nothing to do is not a chamber but a room.

The Curia of Shifting Context — a distinct body, frequently confused with the Curia of Concordant Interpretation on account of the name and, in some years, the personnel — has taken no position on the dispute, which the Curia of Concordant Interpretation has described in its own minutes as "unhelpful but not unexpected."

Records and the minute book

The Curia's minute book is kept by a clerk appointed for life and bound in the order of the sessions rather than the calendar, which makes the record difficult to search and impossible to cite by date without the clerk's assistance. The present clerk, Haland of the Long Corridor, has held the office since 1652 and has been asked to reorder the book three times. She has agreed each time and done nothing.

Minute entries are written in the past tense of a conditional mood peculiar to the Curia, in which findings are recorded as having been made if they would have been made had the session continued. This convention was regularised by the Recension of 1644 and remains in force. Visitors to the chamber are asked not to speak, not to sit, and not to leave during the reading of the minute book, which takes between four and seven hours depending on the length of the session.

The Curia has no seal of its own. Documents issued from Rooms 14 through 22 are sealed with the seal of the Office and countersigned by the Superintendent in a hand that is not required to be legible.