Jurisdictional Overlap

Jurisdictional Overlap is the condition arising when two or more offices, floors, guilds, or Concordance instruments assert authority over the same subject, record, or stretch of corridor at the same time. It is distinguished from ordinary duplication by the requirement that both claims be valid; a claim that is merely wrong is an error, whereas a claim that is correct in the presence of another correct claim is an Overlap. The distinction is recorded in the opening sentence of the Eleventh Concordance, clause 17(a)(iii), and has been litigated at least once per Cycle since the 40th.

Overlap is not, in Librarian doctrine, a fault. It is regarded as the natural settling of a large administration into its own weight, and is managed rather than eliminated. The Committee on Jurisdictional Overlap exists to manage it, subject to the contingency set out at Form JOP-1.

Origins and first recensions

The first recorded Overlap is generally placed in the 33rd Cycle, when the Bureau of Jurisdictional Clarity and the Chronological Ambiance Adjusters independently issued instructions for the re-lettering of the north face of Floor 1188. The instructions differed by one letter and were both carried out. The face has been re-lettered eleven times since and is now considered settled, though the Settling is not agreed upon.

The earliest procedural instrument devoted to the problem is Custodial Mandate 117, which established the principle of Custodial Overlap: where two custodians hold the same object, the object is held jointly and neither may move it. Joint custody has the incidental effect that such objects remain where they are indefinitely. The corridor on Floor 317 is impassable for this reason and has been since the Mandate's second recension.

Later instruments — notably Concordance 14,742 — approached Overlap as a question of precedence rather than possession, and the two approaches have never been reconciled. Jurisdictional Fluidity was introduced as a third position.

Mechanisms of resolution

Three mechanisms are recognized in current practice. Jurisdictional Anchoring fixes a contested claim to a single floor, document, or office and forbids its further migration; it is the heaviest instrument available and is used sparingly. Arbitration of Overlap Disputes proceeds by hearing and produces a Jurisdictional Coda, a short binding paragraph appended to the disputed instrument. The Coda is the ordinary remedy and accounts for most of the amendments to the Concordances.

The third mechanism is the Foundational Adjustment, decreed by the Committee on Jurisdictional Overlap alone, which redraws the boundary itself rather than the claim. Foundational Adjustments are rare, final, and frequently appealed on the ground that an adjustment of the boundary is indistinguishable from a new boundary, and therefore generates the Overlap it was meant to end.

The painter Kessa Vorlan, working the western stair between Floors 604 and 605 in the winter of the 58th Cycle, was served with nine simultaneous work orders from four offices and completed the stair to all nine specifications. The result was a stair that satisfies every order and cannot be climbed without stepping on a painted line reserved for a different office. Access is by written permission of the Committee. No such permission has been requested.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal disagreement in the literature concerns whether Overlap is cause or effect. The Panel on Ontological Overlap holds, following the 61st Cycle ruling, that Overlap precedes the claims that occupy it — that a region of the Tower becomes overlap-prone before any office asserts anything about it, and that offices are drawn to such regions as water to a low place. On this reading the Committee's work is diagnostic rather than corrective.

The contrary position, maintained by the Bureau of Jurisdictional Clarity in its third recension, is that Overlap has no existence apart from the claims, and that the Panel has mistaken a record of many claims for a property of the floor. The Bureau notes that no one has produced a map of an overlap-prone region prior to the first claim upon it.

"Where two valid instruments speak, the floor is not at fault. The Committee is asked to find a property in a corridor which is only the shadow of its paperwork."

— Jurisdictional Fluidity, Annex 2

The Committee has declined to settle the question, on the ground that it concerns a floor and not a jurisdiction. It has applied this ground on at least four occasions and each time recorded the application as a distinct ruling, so that the refusals have themselves accumulated into a body of precedent.

Criticism and the contingency problem

A recurring criticism is that the Committee's own constitution is contingent. It is constituted by a footnote to clause 17(a)(iii) of the Eleventh Concordance and its authority lapses whenever no valid Form JOP-1 petition is on the docket. The resulting gaps — brief, but not instantaneous — have been catalogued in Aperture Ξ-6 since the 55th Cycle, where the number of disputes decided by offices acting on their own initiative during a lapse is recorded as 214.

Whether those 214 decisions survive the Committee's reconstitution is unresolved. The Committee's reckoning, in its 59th Cycle minute, is that the question is one of Jurisdictional Fluidity and would better be put to the Panel. The Panel has not sat since.

See also

• Committee on Jurisdictional Overlap
• Custodial Overlap
• Chronological Ambiance Adjusters
• Department of Ambiance Amp Inclemency
• Stairwell Maintenance