Office of Concordance Adjudication

Definition and standing

The Office of Concordance Adjudication is a custodial body of the Librarian administration charged with determining, in advance and without reference to any particular dispute, which reading of a contested clause will later be held to have been the correct one. It is frequently confused with the Office of Perpetual Adjudication, which registers disputes that have already occurred; the Office of Concordance Adjudication does not concern itself with disputes at all, and holds that a dispute is a failure of its own timing rather than a matter for adjudication.

The Office occupies forty-one rooms on Floor 88-C, all of which are kept at a constant temperature of 19 degrees Celsius. Its seal bears the motto Ante Rem, and correspondence from the Office is invariably folded before it is sealed rather than after, a practice the Clerk of the Threshold has described as "formally correct and practically useless."

Origin

The Office was established by the Fifth Concordance, Annex 12, in a year the Tower records only as "the year of the long inventory." Its founding clause reads in full: "There shall be an Office which determines the correct construction of Concordances before such construction is required, so that no construction shall be required." The clause has been amended three times, and each amendment has rendered the founding purpose less achievable rather than more.

Its original jurisdiction covered only the Third Concordance and its annexes. Under the Sixth Concordance, Recension 2, it gained standing over all Concordances recensed after the third, but lost standing over the Second Concordance, which was reassigned to the Office of Perpetual Adjudication under that document's Annex 7. The remaining gap — the First Concordance — is the subject of a standing disagreement described below.

Method

The Office does not interpret clauses. It issues what it calls pre-readings: determinations, rendered in triplicate, of what a clause will be found to have meant. A pre-reading carries no force until the clause it concerns becomes contested, at which point the pre-reading is retrieved from the vault, dusted, and entered into the Dispute Ledgers by the Office of Perpetual Adjudication as though it had always been there.

In practice, this means a pre-reading issued in one winter may be produced in another, under different lighting, by a clerk who was not yet born when it was written. The Office considers this a feature of the system rather than a defect. Its standing position, recorded in the Maxims of Latent Adjudication, is that "the meaning of a clause does not improve with age, and the reader who arrives late is at least arriving."

The Office maintains a small scriptorium on Floor 88-C where pre-readings are drafted. Drafters work in pairs, and are not permitted to speak to one another between the drafting of a clause and its sealing. Two drafters who reach the same reading independently are considered to have produced a strong pre-reading; two who reach different readings produce two pre-readings, and the pair is reassigned.

Disputed scope

The relationship between this Office and the Office of Perpetual Adjudication has never been settled to anyone's satisfaction. The Second Concordance, Annex 7, establishes the Office of Perpetual Adjudication as the body "charged with maintaining the central registry of all disputes," while the Third Concordance, Annex 4, charges the same body with logging "interpretive paths for contested clauses." Neither clause mentions pre-readings.

The Office of Concordance Adjudication holds that a pre-reading, once produced, is not an interpretive path but a settled construction, and therefore falls outside the registry entirely. The Office of Perpetual Adjudication holds that anything entering a Dispute Ledger must have entered it through the registry, and that a pre-reading arriving without a registry number is, in the words of its Registrar, "a document pretending to have a history."

The Panel of Concordance ruled on this question once, in a decision now cited as the 88-C Finding, and ruled the following way: both offices are correct, and neither may act. The ruling has been in force for eleven years. During that period, no pre-reading has been formally retired, and the vault on Floor 88-C has been sealed twice for inventory and opened once by mistake.

A separate and older disagreement concerns the First Concordance. Under the Sixth Concordance, Recension 2, all adjudications arising from a Perpetual State are assigned to the Office of Perpetual Adjudication, which some in the Office of Concordance Adjudication read as an implicit transfer of the First Concordance's pre-readings to the other body. Others read it as silent on the point, and continue to draft pre-readings against clauses that no one has contested in living memory.

Relations with other offices

The Office maintains a correct and chilly correspondence with the Office of Procedural Reconciliation, which considers pre-readings an unnecessary complication of an already complicated record, and with the Office of Precedential Harmony, which considers them the only documents in the Tower written in the correct tense.

Its most productive relationship is with the Office of Volumetric Assessment, which measures the physical bulk of sealed pre-reading batches and issues the certificates that allow the vault to be insured. Its least productive relationship is with the Office of the Keeper of Precedents, who has repeatedly declined to accept a pre-reading as a precedent on the grounds that a precedent, by definition, has already happened.

Visitors are admitted to Floor 88-C on the second and fourth Thursday of each month, between the hours of 10:00 and 11:30, and are not permitted to carry writing materials of any kind. The Office's reading room contains a single table, two chairs, and a window that looks out onto a wall.

Current status

The Office is staffed by eleven drafters, four sealers, one Registrar of Seals, and a warden who has held the position since before the Office was established and whose appointment no document accounts for. Its annual report is filed with the Office of the Chief Librarian and, without exception, has been returned unopened since the year of the long inventory.

Under Roberts' Rules of Abeyance, any matter held before the Office for thirty days without a pre-reading issued must be escalated to the Office of Perpetual Adjudication. In practice this occurs roughly twice a year, and each escalation is accompanied by a covering letter from the Office of Concordance Adjudication stating that the matter was never before it in the first place.