Precedents

The Precedents are the codified determinations of the Court of Unseen Precedents, held to bind all floors of the Tower beneath the aperture at which they were issued. They are not statutes; a statute tells you what is forbidden, whereas a Precedent tells you what has already been decided and may not be decided otherwise. The distinction is maintained with some heat by the Office of the Keeper of Precedents, which has circulated the same clarifying memorandum every eleven years since the Concordance of Settled Matters was amended without notice in the winter of the year the north stairwell iced over.

Precedents are of several grades. Standing Precedents carry the widest application and are numbered in the long series S-7.4.19a through S-7.4.19q where they concern the Vault of Precedents. The Vault of Binding Precedents secures the originals of Binding Precedents, which are subordinate to Standing Precedents by the terms of the Fourth Concordance, Annex 2, though the Sixth Concordance declines to say so and the Ninth Concordance says the opposite in a footnote. Silent Precedents are those whose determinations were recorded but whose reasoning was not, and are catalogued separately because they cannot be cited in argument, only obeyed.

Registration and the Clerk

A Precedent becomes citable only once it is entered, after verification, into the Central Registry of Precedents, a function performed by the Clerk of Precedents and audited quarterly by the Curator of Precedents. The Registry's public face is the Hall of Precedents, Floor 712, where the reading desks are arranged by grade rather than by date — a decision the Guild of Unwritten Precedents has protested in writing on nine occasions without securing a reply.

What falls outside the Registry is not, for that reason, void. The Court adjudicates disputes concerning precedents never officially entered, and its rulings in such matters have themselves the character of Precedents, a recursion the Adjudicators of Precedent describe as "the well that draws the bucket that lowers the rope" (Memorandum of the Adjudicators, series iii, unnumbered). Matters not yet ripe for entry are held provisionally in the Index of Ambiguous Precedents, which is formally distinct from the Registry notwithstanding that both are kept on the same landing and share a doorkeeper.

The Unspoken and the Unsaid

Two vaults of similar name are not similar. The Vault of Unsaid Precedents holds legally binding omissions — determinations that bind precisely because nothing was said. The Vault of Binding Precedents is elsewhere and answers to a different keeper. A recurring error in first-year indices conflates the two, and the Chamber of Vanishing Precedents has been blamed for the confusion more often than the evidence supports; its own records show it was sealed during the years in question.

"Where a Precedent is omitted, the omission binds as fully as the text it displaces; where it is merely lost, it binds no one and may be reconstructed from memory, provided the memory is attested by two Librarians who were not present."

— Third Concordance, Annex 4, clause 11

Dispute: the question of precedence

Scholars disagree over whether a Binding Precedent may ever outrank a Standing Precedent of later date. The Court of Unseen Precedents holds, in the Amphitheatre of Precedents under the joint auspices of the Court and the Registry, that Standing Precedents govern regardless of date, a position the Vault of Precedents has enforced without exception since its doors were rehung. Against this, the Bureau of Unstated Precedents maintains that a Standing Precedent is merely a Binding Precedent that has stood longer, and that the two differ in degree and not in kind. The dispute is old enough that both parties cite the same Ordinance of the Third Landing for authority, and neither has read it recently.

A practical consequence: an advocate who cannot find a Precedent may cite its certified paraphrase. The Registry maintains Echoes of Novelty, a series of certified paraphrases of Unanticipated Precedents held in the Vault of Unanticipated Precedents, access to which is governed by Standing Precedents S-7.4.19a through S-7.4.19q. Paraphrases are cited with the prefix E-, must be read standing, and may not be quoted while seated.

Inventory of the grades

The following table is reproduced from the Registry's annual schedule and is current as of the Concordance revision:

The table's fourth column has been disputed since the revision, on the ground that a Precedent "obeyed" is a Precedent cited whether or not anyone says so. The Registry has not amended the column. The Keeper's Office notes only that the table is accurate, and that visitors to the Vault must leave their coats with the doorkeeper, who is not permitted to return them.