Doctrine of Perpetual Pending

The Doctrine of Perpetual Pending is the governing tenet of the Department of Perpetual Pending and the philosophical basis of the procedural classification Type 2: Perpetual Pending. It holds that a subject whose status cannot be resolved is not thereby unresolved; it is, rather, correctly and permanently in a state of resolution-deferred, and may be administered indefinitely in that state without loss of standing. The doctrine was given procedural force by Opinion 102 of the Hall of Perpetual Review in the year recorded as 3 Yarrow, and has since been cited in more than eleven thousand dispositions, of which fewer than forty have been read in full by anyone other than their drafters.

In its canonical short form, given in Proclamation of Perpetual Procedure, clause 9, the doctrine states that "a matter rightly held open is a matter rightly held." Later recensions append the qualifier "for so long as the holding is recorded," which the Principle of Perpetual Amendment has twice attempted to strike and twice failed to strike.

Origins and Opinion 102

The doctrine is usually traced to the reception of Pending Adjudications P 4472, a docket of uncertain origin concerning a stairwell that was listed on two floors at once and on neither. When the Department moved to dismiss the docket in the winter of 3 Yarrow, the Clerk of Perpetual Pending of the day invoked the Doctrine of Unvacated Potentiality to stay the dismissal, arguing that a matter with no determined floor had not failed to be located but had succeeded in being located everywhere it might be. The Hall accepted the argument in Opinion 102 and converted the stay into a standing precedent, which it named the Doctrine of Perpetual Pending in the following session.

The doctrine was not, at first, regarded as settled. The Second Concordance treats it as a temporary accommodation to be retired once the stairwell question was answered; the Fifth Concordance, Annex 4, treats it as "of the standing of the walls," meaning immovable. Both remain in force. The Clerk of Perpetual Pending administers the doctrine in its broader reading and has declined, on four recorded occasions, to say which reading the Department follows.

Relationship to Perpetual Habitation

The doctrine is most often discussed as a philosophical challenge to the Doctrine of Perpetual Habitation, which holds that a subject is defined by the floor it occupies. Pending does not deny occupancy; it denies that occupancy must be singular. A subject under the Doctrine of Perpetual Pending occupies the Floor 710 in the sense that its file does, while its disputed premises remain wherever they were disputed. Habitationists object that this makes the Pending Stacks a floor of paperwork rather than of things, a charge the Department has never rebutted and does not appear to regard as an accusation.

The Doctrine of Perpetual Recontextualization has been proposed as a reconciliation. Its partisans argue that a pending subject is not unresolved but continually re-sited, and that the two doctrines differ only in whether the movement is recorded as a location or as an event. The reconciliation has been before the Hall since 11 Yarrow and is expected to remain there.

Procedure and the Hall of Review

Sessions of the Hall of Perpetual Review are presided over by a Clerk selected by lot from the Department, a practice intended to prevent any single Clerk from acquiring a doctrinal preference. It has instead produced a long series of Clerks with strongly held and mutually incompatible preferences, documented in the marginalia of the session rolls. The most cited of these is the note of Clerk Amarin Vesk, who observed in the margin of the 9 Yarrow roll that "the doctrine is not a delay; it is a place where delays are kept." Vesk's note was entered into the record by mistake and has since been cited as authority in two hundred and six dispositions.

Practically, a subject entered under the doctrine is assigned a file in the Office of the Pending, reviewed at intervals of no less than seven years, and returned to its file unaltered unless a Clerk records a change of circumstance. Visitors to the Office are asked not to reshelve anything, as the order of the files is itself the finding. The Doctrine of Perpetual Review governs what happens when a review produces no finding; the answer, in most cases, is another review.

Criticism and the Counting Dispute

The principal scholarly objection concerns counting. If a pending subject is neither dismissed nor resolved, it is unclear whether the archive should count it among its holdings or among its open questions, and the two counts have never agreed. The Third Concordance requires that pending subjects be counted once; the Seventh Concordance, clause 22, requires that they be counted once for each floor on which they might have been resolved. The resulting discrepancy in the Floor 710 inventory is presently 1,414 items and is considered a feature of the record rather than an error in it.

A minority position, associated with the Doctrine of Perpetual Becoming, holds that the doctrine is misnamed: that nothing under it is pending, since pending implies an end, and what the Department administers has no end in view. The Department has not responded to this criticism in writing. The Auto-Generative Loop has been offered as an illustration of the minority view and is not accepted as one by the Hall.

Status

The Doctrine of Perpetual Pending remains in force, uncodified in any single instrument, and amended more often than it is read. Its current text is a composite of Opinion 102, three annexes, the marginal note of Clerk Vesk, and a numbering correction issued by the Office of the Pending in 14 Yarrow. A proposal to consolidate these into one document was tabled in 15 Yarrow and referred, under the doctrine itself, to the Pending Stacks.