Procedural Reconciliation

Definition and Scope

Procedural Reconciliation is the administrative practice by which contradictions arising between two or more valid procedural instruments are brought into a state the Tower recognizes as settled. It is distinguished from substantive reconciliation, which concerns facts, and from textual reconciliation, which concerns wording; procedural reconciliation concerns only the question of which procedure governs when more than one has an equal claim to do so. The distinction is old and frequently contested, but it is upheld in every recension of the Reconciliation Corollary, whose second article holds that "a procedure may be reconciled without any fact being reconciled, and a fact without any procedure, and the Tower shall not confound the two."

The practice is not to be confused with the work of the Office of Procedural Reconciliation, which administers it, nor with Theoretical Reconciliation, which describes what procedural reconciliation would be if it were ever performed in the absence of a filing deadline. The Office of Procedural Reconciliation performs the certification; the practice antedates the office by at least nine centuries.

Origins and the First Reconciliations

The earliest recorded instance is the Winter Reconciliation of Floor 3,041, dated to Year 114 of the Current Concordance, in which two stairwell ordinances claimed simultaneous jurisdiction over the same landing. Neither ordinance was withdrawn. Instead, the clerks of the landing entered a joint minute declaring that "the question of jurisdiction is held open without prejudice to either claimant, and all persons descending shall be deemed to have descended under both." The formula survives almost unchanged in modern practice and is still cited, in the abbreviated form descendit sub utroque, in disputes involving shared apertures.

The practice was regularized following the Aris Reconciliation, which supplied the canonical model for modern frameworks and, more practically, established that a reconciliation must be entered in a numbered register before the close of the quarter in which the contradiction first manifests. Late entries are accepted, but attract a surcharge of one seal impression per instrument, and are stamped with a notation that no reader has ever been able to interpret as anything other than disapproval.

Methods

Procedural reconciliation proceeds by one of four recognized modes: supersession, whereby the later instrument is held to have displaced the earlier without abrogating it; amplification, whereby both instruments are read as addressing different subclasses of the same case; deferral, whereby the contradiction is referred upward to the next floor and not heard of again; and exhaustion, the mode codified in the Silent Reconciliation, under which a contradiction is marked resolved once the office has run out of procedural routes by which to contest it. The last is the least discussed and the most used.

Where the instruments differ only in their designation of the responsible body, the reconciliation may be performed by annotation in the margin of the later instrument, in red ink, with the initials of the reconciling clerk. A clerk of the Fourth Scriptorium, Renu of the Marginal Hand, entered one such annotation in Year 3,977 and was thereafter required to annotate all subsequent reconciliations in a different shade, as the red used was hers personally and not held on issue. She petitioned against the requirement for eleven years. The petition was reconciled by exhaustion.

Disputed Questions

There is long-standing disagreement as to whether procedural reconciliation creates a new procedure or merely clarifies an existing one. The Committee of Concordant Reconciliation, in its foundational framework for Type 1: Concordant Reconciliation, holds that reconciliation is declaratory and that the reconciled procedure "hath ever been what it now is declared to be." The Office of Procedural Reconciliation, in Procedural Bulletin 88, holds the contrary: that a reconciliation produces a procedure whose first valid citation is the reconciliation itself, and that earlier reliance on the unreconciled instruments is to be treated as provisional but not actionable.

The two positions are not reconciled. A third view, advanced in the annexes to Findings and Reconciliation, disputes both and proposes that the question is undecidable, which the Committee has noted without adopting. The Concordance Reconciliation Update Y54315445 directs that citations to either position be accompanied by the other, a requirement honored chiefly in the breach and enforced chiefly against clerks who have already annoyed someone.

"The reconciled procedure is not the offspring of the two instruments, nor their survivor, but their habitation, in which both continue to dwell without seniority."

— Reconciliation of Authorities, Article IV, annex 3

Interface with Dissolution and Audit

Procedural reconciliation is most often invoked when a jurisdiction is dissolved and its procedures survive it. The Office of Procedural Reconciliation adjudicates contradictions in dissolution protocols, and its rulings are themselves subject to dissolution under conditions set out in the Reconciliation of Authorities — an arrangement that has produced at least one ruling dissolving the authority by which it was issued. The office counted 11,406 Gamma Reconciliation Files in active holding in Year 5014, a figure that includes four files reconciling the office's own method of counting files.

Since the Silent Wing Reconciliation, the practice has been formally separated from the work of traceability audits, which are no longer to be conducted concurrently with reconciliation on the same floor. A reconciliation may proceed without any inquiry into whether the reconciled procedure was ever used. Where the Subbureau of Temporal Reconciliation is a party, however, the instruments must be laid side by side in the order of their sealing, not their dating, and the room is to be cleared of all but the reconciling clerk. The reason for this is not recorded.

Record and Corrigibility

Every reconciliation is entered in the registers of the office and is corrigible only by a subsequent reconciliation of the same instrument. Where the original entry contains an error in the instrument's designation, the correcting entry must reproduce the error before correcting it, so that the register shows both the error and its remedy in the same hand. Clerks refer to this as the double entry, and to the practice of correcting the correction as the triple, which is permitted but discouraged.

The standard certificate of reconciliation bears the office seal, the instrument's designation, the mode employed, and the date in the numbering of the Current Concordance. Certificates issued between Year 4,412 and Year 4,419 omit the mode and are accepted without it. No explanation for the omission has been found in the office's records, and the office has declined to supply one.