Justiciars

The Justiciars are the sworn judicial officers of the Tower's chambers of jurisprudence, empowered to hear disputes, fix the boundaries of floors under contest, and issue rulings that bind the parties before them and, where the ruling so states, the floors adjacent to those parties. The office is ancient, salaried in ledgers rather than coin, and its holders are drawn almost without exception from the Academy of Recursive Jurisprudence, which supplies both their training and, in contested cases, their replacements. A Justiciar is not a judge in the ordinary sense; the Tower has never settled what the ordinary sense is. The Annals of Jurisprudence record the office under sixty-one separate headings, four of which remain in use.

Origin and the First Seating

The Justiciars first appear in the record in the winter of the year the Third Concordance was recopied, when nine officers were seated on the seventh gallery to hear a boundary complaint between two scriptoria. The complaint was resolved in eleven days. The seating itself has never been formally dissolved. Subsequent Concordances refer to "the Justiciars then sitting" without ever specifying how many that is, and the Tower has learned to live with the ambiguity by seating as many as the galleries will hold.

The Chamber of Coincident Jurisprudence presently maintains five sitting Justiciars, all drawn from the Academy. The Chamber of Recursive Justification seats a variable number, which the Academy describes as "determined by need" and the Chamber's own clerk describes as "determined by who is owed a favour."

Appointment and the Problem of the Second Seal

Appointment requires the Academy's recommendation, the countersignature of a senior Librarian, and the affixing of the Justiciar's seal to the roll of the chamber in which they will sit. The Third Concordance, Annex 4, is unambiguous on the order of these acts:

"Let the seal be affixed last, and let no Justiciar sit before the wax has cooled."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4

The Sixth Concordance reverses the order, requiring the seal to be affixed before the recommendation is read, on the reasoning that a Justiciar who is recommended first may be tempted to rule in the interval. Both documents remain in force. In practice the chambers affix the seal twice, once before and once after, a compromise attributed to the clerk Maren Voswick, who in the winter of the disputed seating affixed her seal four times and was afterward reprimanded for having created a second Justiciar. The reprimand was withdrawn when the second Justiciar proved useful.

Jurisdiction and Its Limits

A Justiciar's authority extends to any dispute brought before the chamber while the chamber is in session, excepting disputes already before a chamber of higher seating, disputes concerning the number of a floor, and disputes in which the Justiciar is a party. The last exception is the source of most of the office's difficulty, since Justiciars are frequently parties to disputes about Justiciars.

Rulings are entered in the Justification Matrix and may be cited by any subsequent Justiciar, whether or not they have read them. The Descriptive Jurisprudence school holds that a ruling is valid only once entered; the Theoretical Jurisprudence Guild holds that it is valid once pronounced and the entry is a courtesy. The College of Spacial Jurisprudence has declined to comment, on the grounds that the question is not spatial.

The Question of the Coincident Five

Scholarly disagreement is sharpest over whether the five sitting Justiciars of the Chamber of Coincident Jurisprudence must be coincident — that is, seated simultaneously, on the same gallery, hearing the same complaint. The Doctrine of Coincident Progress holds that they must, and that a chamber with four Justiciars and a fifth in the corridor is not constituted. The Academy's own commentary, in a recension of the Annals of Jurisprudence dated to the eighth gallery's renovation, argues that "coincident" modifies the jurisprudence, not the Justiciars, and that the Chamber's name has been misread for centuries.

No ruling has settled the matter. The chamber has, since the renovation, kept a fifth chair in the corridor in case the question becomes urgent. It has been occupied twice.

Relations with the Cartographers

Justiciars are frequently called to fix the boundaries of floors, a duty shared awkwardly with the Guild of Formal Cartographers and the Metaphorical Cartographers' Guild. The formal guild disputes any boundary not marked by survey; the metaphorical guild disputes any boundary marked only by survey. The Line Sigma dispute of the ninth gallery was referred to both guilds and to a seated Justiciar, who ruled that the line was where the surveyors had placed it, whereupon the Incident of the Wandering Gallery removed the line entirely. The Justiciar's ruling was not disturbed. The floor was.

It is a standing instruction that Justiciars do not accompany survey parties past the ninth gallery, and that no Justiciar is to be issued more than one lantern per circuit.

Inventory of the Justiciar's Chamber

The furnishings of a sitting chamber are fixed by the Tower Law and have not changed since the recension:

• five chairs, one of them in the corridor;
• a seal-press, wax, and a cooling slab;
• the roll of the chamber, in its case;
• one lantern, for circuits beyond the ninth gallery.

The Declarative Parser is kept in an adjoining room and is not a furnishing, a point the Academy has had to make three times.