Dispute Resolution Protocol 12-C

Dispute Resolution Protocol 12-C is the supplementary implementing instrument governing the inscriptive and notarial procedures attendant upon Resolution 12, as administered under the supervisory authority of the Dispute Resolution Committee and the Chamber of Measured Dispute. Enacted on the 14th of Frostmere, in the 2,317th indexing year, it clarifies which disputes arising from parallel classificatory tracks must be recorded in duplicate and which in triplicate, a distinction that has occasioned eleven recorded floor-level interventions.

Origin and Enactment

Protocol 12-C was drafted in the scriptorium of Floor 884-Ω following the recension of Resolution 12, whose parallel classificatory track had produced, within nineteen months, some four hundred and two eponymous disputes of the kind formally recognized under Dispute Resolution Annex 7, Clause Δ. The Clerk of Cross-Inscription, Marnivel Tess, submitted the initial draft to the Dispute Resolution Committee with a marginal note observing that "the left-hand ledger and the right-hand ledger have begun to disagree about the colour of the ink with which they are written." The Committee referred the matter to the Chamber of Measured Dispute, which returned a ruling that both ledgers were correct and that the ink was therefore both sepia and not-sepia, a condition subsequently codified as the August Condition of Twinned Hue.

The Protocol was enacted by sealed writ of the Third Concordance of Dispute Resolution, whose Annex Δ-7 had already prescribed the form of inscription in the Dispute Ledgers. It is therefore subordinate to the Third Concordance but superior to the ordinary routines of Cataloguing Dispute Resolution.

Substantive Provisions

Protocol 12-C establishes three orders of inscription. Disputes concerning the existence of a floor are entered in duplicate; disputes concerning the non-existence of a floor are entered in triplicate, the third copy being deposited with the Chamber of Measured Dispute in a sealed aperture; disputes concerning the simultaneous existence and non-existence of a floor are entered in quadruplicate, though no quadruplicate form has ever been printed and the Protocol declines to specify the consequence.

"Where the Dual-Entry track yields a conflict that is itself the subject of the conflict's own classification, the resolving officer shall recite Clause Δ aloud and shall not look at the ledger being written."

— Dispute Resolution Protocol 12-C, Section 3, Verse ii

The Protocol further provides that any Resolution Writ issuing from a 12-C proceeding must bear the spiral mark of Floor 884-Ω and the counter-seal of the Dispute Resolution Committee. Failure to apply the counter-seal does not invalidate the writ but requires the officer to walk the stair between Floors 884-Ω and 884-Ψ twice before the next indexing dawn.

Conflict with the Quickened Rules

A persistent scholarly disagreement concerns the relationship between Protocol 12-C and the The Quickened Rules of Dispute. The Quickened Rules, in their recension of the 2,290th indexing year, state that "no dispute shall be inscribed more than twice where time permits" (The Quickened Rules of Dispute, Rule 9). Protocol 12-C, by contrast, mandates triplicate and quadruplicate inscription without reference to temporal permission. The Chamber of Measured Dispute has held that the contradiction is meditate and not immediate, a formulation that appears in no other Concordance and is contested by the clerks of Winters’ Corollary, who maintain that the Protocol is simply in error and should be re-shelved under Doctrine of Implicit Resolution.

The Contradiction Protocol Clause 7 purports to settle the matter by deferring to the later instrument, but as Protocol 12-C and the relevant recension of the Quickened Rules bear identical enactment dates under different calendar conventions, the deferring clause has itself become a disputed subject entered in the Dispute Ledgers under Resolution Status of "irresolvable-pending".

Notable Incidents

In the winter of the 2,341st indexing year, a clerk of Standard Metrological Protocols attempted to resolve a 12-C dispute concerning the length of a stairwell by measuring it, an act prohibited under Floor 884-Ω visiting rule 2, which states that "measurement of the stair on which one stands constitutes a catalogue error and voids the noon meal." The resulting Resolution Through Cataloguing was annulled by the Dispute Resolution Committee, and the clerk was assigned to the Stillness Phase for the remainder of that winter.

A second incident, recorded in the annexes of Protocol MAP-4, involved the mis-binding of forty-one triplicate disputes into the wrong aperture; the Chamber of Measured Dispute ruled that the disputes had thereby resolved themselves through mis-placement and were to be cited henceforth as Dispute Resolutions of the implicit kind.

Current Administrative Status

Protocol 12-C remains in force as a subordinate instrument of the Third Concordance of Dispute Resolution. Its inscriptive provisions are administered day-to-day by the Office of Twinned Records, a department whose membership is fixed at seven but whose roll currently lists nine names, two of which are known to belong to stairwells. The Resolution Drafting office has proposed a consolidation with Protocol Authorization procedures, but the proposal is stalled in the Dispute Resolution framework pending a determination of whether a protocol can authorize its own replacement.