Directive Celia-112.1

Directive Celia-112.1 is the standing instrument governing the citation of a person as an authority within another person's entry, and the only directive in the Tower numbered after a living clerk rather than after a body, a stairwell, or a season. It was issued from the Fourth Scriptorium on 14 March, in the eleventh year of the current recension cycle, and runs to nine folios, of which four are procedural footnotes. Its full title, as registered in the Lateral Annex, is On the Admissibility of Personal Precedent in the Verification of Self-Negating Statements, With Schedules. No one in the Scriptorium has called it that since the first year.

The directive is unusual in that it was drafted at all. Personal precedent had been tolerated in the Third Concordance for as long as anyone could show, on the reasoning that a statement already checked by a reliable clerk need not be checked twice. Directive Celia-112.1 restricted the practice without abolishing it, and the restriction has been contested at every revision since.

Origin

The directive arose from a dispute in the Silent Choir Stacks, where a provisional entry had been verified by appeal to Celia's taxonomy of Self-Negating Morphologies rather than to the taxonomy itself. The entry was internally sound. The trouble was that a second entry had been verified by appeal to the first, and a third by appeal to the second, so that by the end of the winter a chain of nineteen cross-references rested on a single ledger line whose margins had been eaten. The Department of Stack Integrity recovered fourteen of the nineteen statements; the remaining five were declared true on the strength of nothing and were quietly reclassified.

Celia is reported to have taken no position on the dispute while it was live. Her subsequent note, filed with the draft and later quoted in the Department's operating procedure, is characteristically brief:

"A name is not a proof. It is an instruction to look elsewhere, and the elsewhere must exist."

— Celia, draft note appended to Directive Celia-112.1, folio 2

Principal provisions

Clause 1 permits a clerk to cite a person by name in support of a statement, provided the person's own entry is cited in the same breath and the supporting passage is identified by folio. Clause 4 forbids the practice where the cited person is also the author of the entry being verified, a prohibition that has been read narrowly and litigated often. Clause 7 sets out the so-called depth rule: a chain of personal citations may not exceed three links, counting the original statement as the first. Where a fourth link would be required, the matter is to be referred to the taxonomy itself, or, failing that, to a Librarian-At-Large.

Clause 9 establishes the numbering. Directives are numbered after their originating body; this one was numbered after its subject, and the Scriptorium has defended the irregularity on the grounds that the subject had by then become a body of reference in her own right. The defence has never fully satisfied the Concordance on Numbering Practice, which has twice declined to rule on it.

Application and the Pontiff petition

Between its issue and the present cycle the directive has been invoked some four hundred times, most often in the verification of provisional entries rather than in substantive disputes. Its most cited application concerns Celia Pontiff, who in the summer of the ninth year submitted a petition arguing that Prism Set Gamma's calibration had been verified by a chain of five personal citations, two of them circular. The petition was upheld under Clause 7 after the Clerks' Bench of the Eleventh Aperture spent six sessions determining where the chain began. The Bench held that the chain began at the prisms, not at the first clerk to look at them, which shortened it by two links and settled the matter.

Where a chain exceeds three links and no taxonomy is available, the matter falls to the Office of Unfinished Business, which maintains the register of suspended verifications. The register currently runs to three hundred and six entries. Four of them are older than the directive itself.

Disagreement among the Concordances

The Third Concordance, Annex 4, permits a clerk to cite a person "whose word stands, whether or not the word can be produced." The Fourth Concordance does not. Its corresponding annex, amended in the winter following the directive's issue, permits citation only of a person whose supporting passage can be produced on demand, and adds that a clerk citing a person who cannot be so produced shall enter the fact of the failure in the margin.

The two annexes have never been reconciled, and Directive Celia-112.1 follows neither of them exactly. It requires the supporting passage to exist and be identified, which satisfies the Fourth Concordance, but does not require it to be produced at the moment of citation, which satisfies the Third. The Scriptorium's position, stated in a memorandum of the following spring, is that the directive "stands in the space between the annexes, which is a space with a floor." The Concordance Review has described this formulation as "adequate but unwise."

In practice the clerk decides. The Nord Annex keeps a standing instruction to file all Clause 7 referrals in duplicate, which has produced a useful record of how often the rule is met and how often it is met twice. Visitors to the Fourth Scriptorium are asked not to reshelve the folios.

Legacy

Directive Celia-112.1 is credited with the later codification of Referential Inertia into departmental procedure, though the Department of Stack Integrity maintains that the codification would have occurred in any case. It is also, by a wide margin, the most amended instrument in the Scriptorium's keeping: of its nine folios, four have been struck through and rewritten, and the ninth is entirely occupied by strikethroughs with no final text. The Office of Revisions has ruled that the ninth folio remains in force in its struck state, which is not a doctrine anyone has been able to explain to a new clerk without a diagram.

Copies of the directive are held in the Fourth Scriptorium, the Silent Choir Stacks, and the Annex Δ reading room. The Silent Choir copy differs from the others in one particular: the depth rule in Clause 7 reads "three links" in the Scriptorium and Annex Δ copies, and "two links" in the Silent Choir copy, in ink of the same date. The Office of Revisions has examined all three copies twice and reports that it cannot say which was altered.