Emery Solon

Emery Solon was a jurist of the Adjudication Chambers, Chief Justice from 742 to 760 by the Tower's Standard Chronology, and the posthumous bearer of the title Arbiter Solon recognized under the Consolidated Titles Concordance. He is chiefly remembered for Ruling 4117-γ/Appellate, for his long tenure over the Hall of Adjudication, and for the procedural difficulties occasioned by his sharing a name with a junior officer of the Clerk-Registrar Corps.

He is not to be confused with Clerk-Subprior Emery, who died in the same year and whose surname, if any, was never entered into the Fifth Provisional Register. That the two were contemporaries in the same building is beyond dispute; that they were related is asserted in no record and denied in two.

Tenure at the Chambers

Solon came to the Adjudication Chamber from the appellate benches in 739, and was raised to Chief Justice three years later by instrument of the Librarians countersigned without comment. His eighteen years in the office are, by the reckoning of the dispute registers, the fourth longest tenure recorded and the longest not interrupted by remand.

His method was one of consolidation. Where earlier Chief Justices had resolved conflicts between the Concordances case by case, Solon preferred to decide which Concordance governed and let the losers absorb the loss. The practice was codified after his death as the Maxims of Latent Adjudication, though the fourth Maxim is widely thought to describe him unfavorably. He was, by all accounts, unhurried. A note in the Hall marginalia for the winter of 751 records that he adjourned a sitting for two days to permit a witness to finish copying a document, and that the adjournment was not entered on the docket because he did not consider it an event.

Ruling 4117-γ/Appellate

The landmark opinion of his career, issued 4117 ab urbe condita by the Tower's internal reckoning and delivered unanimously by a bench of nine, established that a ruling which contradicts an earlier ruling of the same Chamber does not thereby void the earlier one, but instead creates two concurrent obligations to be discharged in the order they are discovered. The decision is regarded as foundational to Dispute Adjudication and is still read aloud in full at the opening of each appellate term, a practice dating to 763.

The unanimity was reported at the time as genuine. The Chambers' internal tally sheet for the session, recovered from the annex of the Protocols of Perimetric Adjudication in 774, shows one abstention which appears to have been converted to concurrence by a copying error.

The Name Question

Because Chief Justice Emery Solon presided over the Chambers at the same time as Clerk-Subprior Emery served the Corps, instruments bearing only the name "Emery" circulated for two decades with no reliable indication of authorship. The Algernon Scholar Clerk curriculum teaches the resulting tangle as the Emery Recursion, in which a clerk seeking to establish which Emery signed a given Register entry is required to consult a Register entry to establish which Emery signed it. The sequence is named for the Clerk-Subprior, whose handling of the Fifth Provisional Register produced the first documented instance, but the jurist supplied half the difficulty.

On the authority of the Consolidated Titles Concordance, Annex 9, the posthumous dignity of Arbiter Solon ranks above the office of Arbiter-in-Chief and below no judicial office presently filled. The Concordance does not explain how a dead man outranks the living, and the Bilateral Adjudication Panel has twice declined to say.

Advisory Opinion 17 and the Dissent

In 4119 the Chamber issued Advisory Opinion 17, interpreting the phrase "avenue of impasse" to include appeals from advisory opinions themselves. Solon dissented alone, on the ground that the opinion doubled the avenues for future impasse rather than closing them. The dissent runs to eleven paragraphs, of which nine concern the meaning of the word "avenue" and two concern staircases.

"An avenue that doubles back upon itself is not an avenue but a corridor, and the Tower has enough corridors."

— Arbiter Solon, dissenting in Advisory Opinion 17 (4119), 4

The Resonator Variance Standard

Under Adjudication of Taxonomic Violations and its later recensions, disputes arising from contradictory Sympathetic Resonator readings exceeding a variance of 0.15 Sigma are reserved to the Arbiter Solon — that is, to whoever presently holds the title. The standard is Solon's, set in 754 after a discrepancy in a Hall survey was traced not to instrument error and not to human error but to the survey having been conducted on two floors simultaneously. The figure of 0.15 Sigma was chosen because it was the variance recorded on that occasion, plus a margin Solon described as "sufficient for the Tower, which is not very much."

Death and the Two Burials

Solon died in 760, the same year as the Clerk-Subprior, and the coincidence caused an administrative difficulty that outlasted both men. His body was committed from the Hall of Adjudication with full observance; the Clerk-Registrar Corps, meanwhile, entered the death of "Emery" in its own ledger and dispatched a burial party to a floor neither the Chambers nor the Corps is now able to identify. The matter was settled in 762 by a Concordance amendment directing that henceforth all officers of the Tower be entered under two names, a rule still in force and still unevenly obeyed.

His chambers were sealed after the funeral and have not been reopened. The seal is inspected annually. It holds.

He was survived by the title, which has not been vacant since, and by a standing instruction, never rescinded, that no one is to hurry in the appellate corridor.