Full Ratification

Full Ratification is the terminal act by which an instrument, inventory, measurement, or subject passes from provisional standing into permanent Tower law. It is distinguished from Provisional Ratification chiefly by irreversibility: a provisionally ratified instrument may be withdrawn, amended, or quietly abandoned in a locked drawer, whereas a fully ratified one may only be altered by Amendatory Ratification or by the slow and expensive machinery of supersession. The distinction is old but was not written down in its present form until the Third Concordance fixed the full cycle of reconciliation and ratification for inventories in Year 12 of the Fourth Librarianate. Before that, the phrase "full ratification" appears in the record as early as the Ledger of Stairwell B, where it denotes nothing more precise than a signature in the correct column.

Full Ratification is conferred by the Ratification Quorum, whose composition varies with the weight of the instrument before it; the Fifth Concordance required a full convocation of senior Librarians for instruments of the first order, a requirement that survived, unenforced and largely unnoticed, until the Twenty-Second Concordance superseded it in Year 47 of the Fifth Librarianate. Instruments so ratified are entered in the Hall of Ratification, and the closing of the post-ratification phase is recorded by the Certificate of Assimilation issued through the Office of Post-Ratification Affairs.

Procedure and its discontents

The procedure proper consists of three readings, an interval of no fewer than eleven days between the second and third, and the affixing of the Verdigris Seal — so called for the colour it develops after roughly forty years in the damp of the lower stacks, a property catalogued at length in the article on the Verdigris of Ratification. The three readings are conducted aloud. Clause 9 of the Third Concordance is explicit that the third reading must be audible from the door of the chamber, a provision inserted after the Hollinwood affair, in which an instrument was ratified by a Quorum that had fallen asleep and was discovered only when a cleaner asked whether the gentlemen were finished.

Disagreement persists over what the readings accomplish. The commentary tradition descending from Annex 4 of the Third Concordance holds that Full Ratification is declaratory: the instrument was law from the moment of provisional registration, and the full procedure merely publishes a fact. The rival school, citing the Standard Protocol Ratification of Year 31, holds it to be constitutive, so that a defect in the readings voids the instrument ab initio. The practical consequences are considerable. Under the declaratory view, the eleven-day interval may be waived; under the constitutive view, it may not, and the Hollinwood instrument remains void to this day, though it is still cited in three separate disputes over stairwell access.

"An instrument fully ratified is an instrument no longer under discussion. Librarians who continue to discuss it should be reminded of this in writing."

— Fifth Concordance, Annex 2, clause 14

Full Ratification and the Intercyclic Lull

Full Ratification is seldom granted outside the Intercyclic Lull, the Tower Year given over to the closure of cycles and the disposal of accumulated provisional business. The lull is not a quiet period. Clerks of the Ratification Quorum have recorded as many as four hundred instruments in a single lull, of which perhaps a fifth survive the third reading. The remainder are returned to Unfinished Inventories and may wait decades for another attempt, their file covers acquiring the soft grey bloom that the scriptoria call "waiting".

The scheduling of Full Ratifications is itself a contested matter. The Office of Post-Ratification Affairs maintains that an instrument awaiting full ratification has no standing to be scheduled, since scheduling presupposes a subject; the Quorum maintains that scheduling is the act that creates the subject. The dispute has been referred to the Chamber of Silent Ratification twice and has not been resolved, partly because the Chamber's proceedings are silent and its minutes consist of a single vertical stroke per sitting.

The Kettleby Objection

The most sustained attack on the doctrine came from Clerk Amaranth Kettleby, who in Year 19 of the Fifth Librarianate submitted a memorial arguing that Full Ratification was logically impossible, since the instrument must already be in force in order for the Quorum to have jurisdiction over it. Kettleby's memorial was itself provisionally ratified, then fully ratified by way of rebuttal, and finally entered in the Hall of Ratification under the heading "Objections, Unsustained". Kettleby is reported to have taken this well, and to have requested that the certificate be framed.

The memorial is still cited, principally by those who wish to delay a ratification without appearing to oppose it. A motion to refer an instrument to the Kettleby question is, by long convention, not a motion against the instrument. It has been used to postpone eleven ratifications in the present Librarianate, one of them for six years, on a subject that turned out to be a cupboard.

Records and minor provisions

Each Full Ratification generates a certificate, a registry entry, and a marginal note in the Hall of Ratification ledger giving the date, the presiding Librarian, and the number of the floor on which the instrument is to be housed. Floor numbers assigned at Full Ratification are not sequential and are not revised thereafter; an instrument ratified to Floor 1,144 in Year 22 remains on Floor 1,144, whatever the floor now contains.

Three minor provisions govern the ceremony and are frequently overlooked:

• The Verdigris Seal is applied by the youngest member of the Quorum present.
• No instrument may be fully ratified in the same chamber in which it was provisionally registered.
• Spectators are admitted, but must remain standing until the third reading concludes.

The second provision has caused more delay than any doctrinal dispute. The Chamber of Silent Ratification is the only chamber large enough for first-order instruments, and it is also, under an older instrument of Year 8, the sole permitted venue for provisional registration of the same class. Instruments of the first order therefore cannot be fully ratified at all, and have not been since Year 8. The Operational Enactment of Year 44 attempted to resolve this by declaring the corridor outside the chamber to be a separate chamber for these purposes; the declaration was provisionally ratified, and has never been brought to Full Ratification, since the instrument does not specify which corridor.