Draft Provisions

The Draft Provisions are the subordinate class of instrument issued by the Chancery of Directives between the ratification of a Concordance and the publication of its implementing ordinance. Unlike a Draft Concordance, which proposes language for a Concordance not yet adopted, a Draft Provision governs conduct immediately, in provisional form, and is held to bind until superseded, withdrawn, or — in the Chancery's phrasing — "settled into permanence by the passage of sufficient Epochs." Sufficient has never been defined. The oldest Draft Provisions in continuous force are dated to Epoch 4,102 and remain the operative law of Floors 88 through 91.

Draft Provisions are numbered by a system the Chancery has never published and has twice denied possessing. Their designations combine an ordinal, a letter, and — since Epoch 12,660 — a decimal suffix appended by the Ordinance Clarifiers to distinguish a provision from its own restatements.

Origin and the Provisional Compromise

The class emerged from the Fifth Concordance's emergency provisions, under which the initial draft of the Inkwell Concordance was ratified before its annexes had been read aloud. Faced with a body of law that existed but could not yet be recited, the Chancery adopted the practice of issuing the unread portions as Draft Provisions, each stamped pro tempore sed firmiter — for the time being, but firmly. The stamp is still applied by hand.

Scholarship is divided on whether the Draft Provisions were a deliberate instrument or an accident of procedure. The Chancery's own Recension of the Provisional Compromise, fol. 12v holds that the practice was "conceived in full and intended from the first." The Precedent Register, in its marginalia to the Dispute of the Damp Draft, records the contrary: "the class was not designed but accumulated, as sediment accumulates, and no one since has been willing to take a core sample." Both are cited with equal frequency and neither has been withdrawn.

"A Draft Provision is the law until someone with standing says otherwise. Standing is established by objection. Objection is itself governed by a Draft Provision."

— Chancery of Directives, Circular 6-C, Annex B

Relation to other instruments

Draft Provisions are frequently confused with the Standard Protocols and with the numbered protocols issued under the Proposed Containment Protocols. The distinction is one of custody. A Standard Protocol is held by the office that enforces it; a Draft Provision is held by the Chancery regardless of who enforces it, and is produced on demand for inspection, provided the demand is made in writing, on the correct form, and not during the hours in which the Chancery is recopying.

The most consequential Draft Provision in the current register is Draft Provision 881.α, authored by Kaelen, Scribe-Adjunct of the Cartographers' Auxiliary, which supplies the procedural framework for monitoring the Chill Draft in the shaft between Floors 717 and 718. Its much-annotated predecessor, Draft Δ-7, was an initial proposal for Clause 19γ and was rejected on grounds the Chancery described as "climatic."

A narrow and much-resented subclass, the Draft Provision of Illumination, was created under the Emergency Illumination Provisions to authorize Heliothermic Shaft 2001-Alpha. Provisions in this subclass may be amended by lamplight, and only between the hours of the second and fourth bell.

The Clarifiers' decimal dispute

Since the Ordinance Clarifiers assumed responsibility for suffixes, every Draft Provision of more than three clauses carries a decimal distinction among its own restatements, so that 881.α and 881.α.1 may differ by a single clause and by an interval of forty Epochs. The Clarifiers maintain that this prevents citation error. The Transition Oversight Committee has twice found that it causes citation error, most recently in Epoch 44,806, when a provision concerning damp was cited at the wrong decimal before the Bureau of Damp Permissions and three floors were reclassified as atmospheric.

The following table records the current disposition of the Draft Provisions most often requested from the Chancery's reading room:

The Ferrule Objection

In Epoch 44,791, the clerk Ferrule of the Chancery's second scriptorium lodged a formal objection to the entire class on the ground that a provision cannot be both provisional and binding, and that the Draft Provisions therefore "hold no weight, and ought to be read for pleasure only." The objection was referred to the Precedence Edict procedure, where it remains pending. Ferrule was reassigned to the recopying of superseded suffixes and is understood to have withdrawn the objection privately. It has never been formally withdrawn, and the Precedent Register accordingly lists the question as open.

Pending resolution, the Chancery continues to issue Draft Provisions at a rate of roughly sixty per Epoch. No Draft Provision has ever been formally revoked; the class is not capable of revocation, only of being overtaken. A reader who wishes to know the present law of any given floor is advised to consult the most recent Draft Provision bearing on it and then the three immediately preceding it.

Visiting rules

Draft Provisions may be consulted in the Chancery reading room on Floors 315 to 318. Inks, and any substance capable of marking a page, must be left at the desk. Food is permitted only in the annex, and only provisions that do not crumble.