Ordinance of Conditional Closure Occ 8812

Ordinance of Conditional Closure OCC-8812 is the instrument by which a matter is held open without being concluded, and is the founding charter of the Division of Conditional Permissions. First engrossed in the 12th year of the 47th Cataloguing Cycle and amended, by the Division's own count, one hundred and forty times since, it establishes the three criteria by which a resolution may be classified as Conditional rather than Final, and it is the document most often cited in the Tower and least often read to its end.

The Ordinance is distinguished throughout from the Ordinance of Cessation 73-C, which enacts permanent cessation. OCC-8812 does nothing permanently. It suspends. What it suspends, and for how long, is the substance of most disputes concerning it.

The Three Criteria

Under Clause 2, a matter is a Pending Resolution only where all three of the following obtain: that a condition has been named in writing; that the condition has not yet lapsed; and that no instrument of cessation has been filed against it. A matter meeting only two criteria is described in the Ordinance's schedule as "open, and not thereby unresolved" — a phrase that has generated more litigation than any other in the document.

The criteria are cumulative. Verification of Closure may be requested only where a condition has been named, and the naming must be countersigned by a Librarian-Provisional before the third criterion can be assessed at all. In practice this means that a matter may pass years in a state the Division calls, without evident embarrassment, "provisional in respect of its own provisionality."

Countersignature and Filing

An Ordinance of Conditional Closure cannot be revoked while its condition naturally stands; revocation requires a separate Ordinance, countersigned and filed with the local Bilateral Adjudication Panel. The panels maintain their own registers, which are not reconciled with the Division's, and the discrepancy between the two is the ordinary working condition of the Ordinance rather than an anomaly.

Signature practice follows Signatory Obliviation where the original signatory has since been struck from the rolls. The Division has ruled twice — in the Second Recension and again in the Marginalia of the Fourth Recension — that a struck signatory's countersignature retains its force, on the reasoning that an obliterated signatory cannot withdraw it.

Relation to the Concordances

OCC-8812 is often confused with the Ordinance of Conditional Closure described in the governing text of the Division, which is the same instrument under a shorter title. The confusion is worsened by Concordance 447 and Concordance 611, which cite the Ordinance under incompatible readings.

447 holds that conditional closure may be declared by the Division alone; 611, promulgated some forty years later, requires that the declaration be witnessed by a second office. Concordance 903 claims to reconcile them, but does so by introducing a distinction between "closure" and "closure in effect" that appears nowhere in the Ordinance and has never been defined. The Office of Ceremonial Consistency has declined to rule on which reading governs, noting in its minute of 14 Frost, Year 63, that "the question is properly one for the Division, which has not asked it."

Incident at Floor 2,209

In the winter of Year 61 a matter on Floor 2,209 was placed under conditional closure by a clerk of the Division, one Clerk Avensal, who named as the condition the completion of a stairwell survey then three years overdue. The survey was completed. The condition lapsed. No instrument of cessation was filed, and the matter accordingly remained a Pending Resolution under Clause 2 — a state the Ordinance permits and does not otherwise describe.

Avensal petitioned three times for the file to be closed. Each petition was returned unstamped, on the ground that the file was already closed, being a Pending Resolution and therefore not open. The matter remains on the Floor 2,209 register. Avensal's fourth petition, submitted in Year 68, was accepted and filed under the head "closure, retroactive, uncontested." No further entry appears.

Textual History and Dispute

The Ordinance survives in four recensions. The First lacks the third criterion entirely; the Second supplies it in a hand not otherwise found in the Division's register. Scholars of the Division's scriptorium differ as to whether the third criterion was original and struck, or added and back-dated. Librarian Ossic of the Ninth Aperture argued for addition, on the ground that the ink of Clause 2 is a shade darker than the surrounding text; the Division has not ruled, and the question is now more than two centuries old.

The operative text is held to be the Fourth, though the Division continues to amend it and has not re-engrossed it since Year 88. Amendments are recorded on slips pasted into the working copy held at the Division's desk. Two slips fell out in Year 91 and have not been recovered.

"The Ordinance is to be read whole, or not at all; and where it cannot be read whole, it is to be read as it stands."

— OCC-8812, Annex A, Clause 4

Visitors to the Division's desk are asked not to turn the pages of the working copy. The slips are loose.