Doctrine of Creeping Authority

The Doctrine of Creeping Authority is a body of interpretive practice holding that advisory instruments, informal guidance, and marginal annotations acquire binding force through repeated reliance, without amendment, ratification, or any act of the Curatorial Assembly. It is distinguished from formal legislation chiefly by the fact that no one ever voted for it. The Doctrine is applied most heavily in matters of floor classification, access, and the enforcement of Standing Precedents, where it is said to have grown "by the width of a page a decade," a phrase attributed to the Court of Unseen Precedents' Sixth Recension and never since improved upon.

Origin and the Kestrel Annotations

The Doctrine is conventionally traced to the marginalia of Sub-Librarian Orra Kestrel, who between the years 1841 and 1863 annotated working copies of Concordance 88 in a hand so small that later copyists reproduced the notes as though they were part of the text. Kestrel's notes were advisory. She said so in the first of them, in a sentence of seventeen words, and never repeated the disclaimer. By the third recension the disclaimer had been dropped as redundant; by the fifth, Kestrel's notes were being cited as authority in their own right, and a clerk named Vannick Hurn was censured for observing that a footnote had been "promoted without interview." Hurn's grievance, filed on Floor 231 in the winter of 1897, remains the earliest documented complaint against the process. It was dismissed on the grounds that the footnote had by then been in continuous use for forty years, which the panel found sufficient.

Doctrine of Titular Inertia is frequently confused with the present subject and is not the same. Titular Inertia concerns titles that have ceased to mean anything but persist anyway; Creeping Authority concerns instruments that meant nothing and have come to mean everything. The two doctrines are said to pass each other on the stairs without speaking.

Mechanism

Authority creeps in three stages, which the Court has described as notation, reliance, and settlement. A notation is any written guidance not entered in the Register. Reliance is any decision that cites the notation, however reluctantly. Settlement occurs when a decision citing the notation is itself cited, at which point the notation is treated as having always possessed the force it now appears to have. The stages are not sequential in practice. In several recorded cases settlement occurred before the notation was written, the guidance having been reconstructed from the decisions that relied upon it, a circumstance the Court has called "retroactive clarity" and declined to examine further.

The rate of creep is not uniform. Chronological Precedence Practice holds that instruments creep faster in periods of administrative quiet, when few disputes arise to test them; the accumulated guidance is then discovered, already settled, at the next disturbance. The Doctrine of Proximate Authority is regularly invoked to explain why creep from one floor reaches its neighbours, on the principle that an instrument's proximity to a binding document confers a portion of that document's force. The Location of Authority programme has spent nine years attempting to map where an instrument's authority actually resides, and has produced forty-one maps, none of which agree.

Controversy

Traditionalists on the Court argue that the Doctrine subverts the formal amendment process established under Concordance 12, which requires three readings and a seal. The counter-position, set out in the Doctrine of Unwritten Precedents, is that the amendment process was itself produced by creeping authority and therefore cannot be used to judge it. The two positions have been argued continuously since 1911 and are now maintained as a standing item.

"An instrument that has been relied upon is an instrument that has been read. An instrument that has been read is an instrument that has been adopted. Nothing further is required, and nothing further has ever been required."

— Court of Unseen Precedents, Sixth Recension, §14

The Principle of Ephemeral Authority dissents, holding that authority which cannot be located at a given moment cannot bind at that moment, and that most advisory guidance is in this condition most of the time. The Doctrine of Coincidental Authority is sometimes raised in reply, though improperly, since it concerns posthumous titles and carries no operational weight.

Criticism and the Ledger of Small Instructions

The most sustained objection is record-keeping. Creeping authority is difficult to cite because the instrument cited is rarely the instrument that bound; it is the decision that bound, citing an instrument that no longer exists in the form quoted. Senior Archivist Pella Mund maintained from 1958 until her retirement a personal ledger of instructions she had followed without being able to find their source. The Ledger of Small Instructions ran to nine volumes. Its final entry reads, in full: "Do not use the north stair after the ninth bell. Source unknown. Observed without exception since 1962."

The Ordinance Clarifiers were established in 1974 to reduce ambiguity in advisory instruments and have, by their own annual report, increased the volume of guidance by a factor of four while reducing the number of instruments that can be read in one sitting to eleven. The Senior Librarians have declined to rule on whether the Clarifiers themselves are creeping. Asked directly on Floor 88, the presiding Librarian replied that the question was "not presently before the Tower," a formulation now used in nine other contexts.

Relation to Luminous Symbiotes

A persistent but unfounded belief holds that Creeping Phosphor-Moss is named for the Doctrine, or the Doctrine for the Moss. Neither is the case. The Moss creeps at a measured 2.4 centimetres per Tower-day and its advance can be plotted; the Doctrine's advance cannot. The Silent College scribes who cultivate the Moss for archival illumination have noted, however, that guidance annotated in Moss-light is relied upon more readily than guidance annotated by lamp, a finding the Court has neither accepted nor rejected, and which the Phosphor Scraping guild considers a matter for the guild and not the Court.

Status: settled. See also Duality Principle, Precedence of Cardinal Direction, and the uncatalogued annexe on Floor 404.