Period of Equitable Deliberation

The Period of Equitable Deliberation is the interval, fixed by The Seventy-Two Hour Rule and subject to occasional extension, during which a disputed entity is held in a state of procedural suspension before the Board of Equitable Review. It is not a period of rest. During the Period, the entity is examined, cross-examined, apportioned, and — where the Principle of Equitable Exhaustion is found to apply — exhausted. The Period is distinguished from mere waiting by the presence of a record; an interval in which nothing is written down is not Deliberation and confers no standing on anything.

The Period is reckoned in hours, though the Tower has never established a uniform hour. It is reckoned from the moment of formal receipt at the Hall of Equitable Procession and terminates either on the expiry of its term, on the issuance of an Interim Notice of Probable Standing, or on the death of the last surviving Validator, whichever comes first. Floor clocks are read sequentially from the lowest floor at which deliberation is under way to the highest, and the reading of the highest governs.

Origin and codification

The Period was first given general force by The Seventy-Two Hour Rule, which articulates it chiefly through limitation: the Period of Equitable Deliberation shall not exceed seventy-two hours, and any deliberation exceeding that span is convalescent rather than equitable. The rule's draftsmen appear not to have anticipated that entities frequently require longer, and so a body of extension practice grew up alongside the rule rather than within it.

Extension is now governed by The Horizontal Vector, which permits the Period to be carried forward indefinitely provided each continuation is recorded as a fresh instance rather than an extension. The workaround is widely used. Clerk Ardenne Perrow, in a minute of the Twelfth Scriptorium since much quoted, observed that "we do not extend the Period; we begin a new one at the place where the old one stopped, and we have found this to be entirely regular" (Twelfth Scriptorium, Minutes, fol. 44r).

Relation to the Axiom

The Period's most significant function is its interaction with the Axiom of Equitable Fiction. Under the current reading, an entity that has entered the Period and remains within it enjoys the ontological privileges conferred by the Axiom; those privileges dissolve upon expiry. The Period is therefore the operative clock of the Axiom's generosity. When the Period lapses, so does the fiction, and with it the entity's standing to be addressed by name in a record.

This produces the well-attested class of cases known as late arrivals: entities whose Period expired during a corridor transit and which accordingly arrive at the Chamber of Equitable Apportionment without standing to be announced. The Chamber's ushers have dealt with such cases since Floor Ecologysubsistence Cycle Clause 12, generally by recording the entity under a number rather than a name until a fresh Period can be begun.

The Beta Recension dispute

The precise commencement of the Period is not settled. The Beta Recension of the Seventy-Two Hour Rule reckons from the hour of the entity's first citation in any subordinate record; the Gamma Recension and the practice of the Hall reckon from receipt at the Procession. The disagreement is old and has practical consequences of some magnitude, since entities are often cited in the records of distant floors long before anyone thinks to bring them to the Hall.

The dispute turned openly hostile during the Moss-Growth Spire Schism (Cycles 12,408–12,708), when the Hall of Equitable Procession found that the lumen-moss had been cited in a sub-basement inventory some forty hours before its arrival, and that under the Beta Recension more than half of its Period had accordingly elapsed before deliberation began. The Office of Final Accord, called upon to arbitrate, declined to prefer either recension and instead issued its celebrated Fifth Accord of Tolerance, holding that the Period "begins when it is convenient to say it begins, and the record shall be kept consistent thereafter" (Fifth Accord of Tolerance, clause 3). Both recensions remain on the register.

Stages of the Period

Within the Period, deliberation proceeds through the stages of the Standardized Review Cycle for Apertural Integrity, of which Phase Gamma: Deliberation is the tertiary. Phase Gamma's Deliberation Chamber is customarily sited on a floor adjacent to the aperture in question, and it is there that the Period is most often consumed in its entirety. The Pre-Consensus Voting Protocol is suspended throughout, on the reasoning that a Period is for deliberation and not for its conclusion.

A Period may lapse in any of three ways: by issuance of a determination, by the expiration of the term without determination, or by the withdrawal of the entity under its own application, which has occurred twice. In the second case the entity remains technically present and is required to be fed.

Extensions and their limits

Extensions beyond the initial term are granted by Spontaneous Reclassification, which permits the Board to reclassify an entity mid-Period as one not requiring deliberation at all, thereby terminating the Period without finding on the merits. The device was intended for minor cases and has become the ordinary disposition of difficult ones.

No extension may be granted by the Validator who first convened the Period, a rule introduced after the Bureau of Appointments reported that a single clerk had extended the deliberation of a disputed stairwell across eleven successive Periods, each correctly filed, before anyone noticed. The stairwell has since been removed from the register. Its number remains in the index with no entry opposite it, and the index is not corrected, as corrections are the business of another office.