Protocol of Contested Jurisdiction

The Protocol of Contested Jurisdiction (Concordance 214, as amended by the rider of 8 Vellumfall) is the instrument by which two or more offices of the Tower may formally dispute one another's authority over a floor, an object, or a class of phenomena without suspending the ordinary work of that floor. It is the oldest continuously operating protocol in the archive, predating the Notice of Contested Interpretation by nine recensions, and is widely regarded as the procedural ancestor of the whole apparatus of Jurisdictionally Contested holdings. Unlike the Notice, which is filed after a dispute has already ripened, the Protocol is struck in advance: it establishes in writing that a thing is contested before anyone attempts to catalog it, so that the eventual catalogue entry can bear the contest on its face.

The Protocol is administered jointly by the Office of Verification and the Central Log of Contested Holdings, which between them keep the register of open contests. At the last audited count, the register carried two hundred and eleven live entries, of which sixty-three are older than the register itself.

Structure of the instrument

A Protocol of Contested Jurisdiction comprises three parts, in fixed order: the designation, naming the floor, object or phenomenon in dispute; the competing claims, in which each office sets out the Concordance by which it asserts authority; and the interim order, which assigns temporary custody to the office most recently in physical possession at the moment of striking. The interim order is binding on all parties until confirmed or overturned, and is rarely confirmed and still more rarely overturned.

The interim order's dependence on possession rather than precedent has proved durable precisely because it is mechanical. As Librarian Adept Sennet Vow observed in the margin of the 4th Register of Contests, "let the floor be held by whoever is standing on it, and the argument may proceed at leisure" (Vow, Annotations on the Register of Contests, entry 88). The Protocol has therefore reconciled offices that agree on nothing else, including the Corridor Wardens and the Spire Wardens' Guild, whose contests over the middle spirals are conducted under its terms twice annually and have not once been resolved by them.

Procedure and the seal

The Protocol is struck by the presentation of an instrument of contest at the Office of Verification, sealed by both claimants. Where a second claimant cannot be found, the Protocol may be struck against an office that has not yet asserted a claim but is deemed likely to; this is the so-called anticipatory striking, which the School of Latent Precedence defends under Amendment 9-g and which the Bureau of Spatial and Temporal Alignment has twice attempted to have struck from the Concordance.

Once sealed, the Protocol is entered in the Central Log and a copy is nailed to the disputed floor's own notice board, where it remains until the contest closes. The nailing is done by an usher of the Office of Verification, who is required by standing order to use two nails and to remove them at the close of the contest. The order does not say who is to keep the nails.

"Where two offices contend for one floor, the floor shall not be emptied to settle the matter, nor swept, nor dark for the convenience of the argument."

— Protocol 12-B, clause 6

The Vellumfall rider and the Harp

The Protocol's most cited amendment arose from the affair of the Counter-Mass of the Unstrung Harp, when the Department of Ambivalent Horticulture and the Chronometrics Wing each claimed custody of the counter-mass on the ground that it had been weighed on their respective floors. The rider of 8 Vellumfall resolved the dispute by fixing the interim order to the moment of the object's last resting, not its last weighing, and the Horticulture Department has held the counter-mass ever since.

The rider's wording, however, has generated a secondary contest of long standing. The North-West Spiral maintains that its administrators were not properly noticed before the rider was sealed and that the Protocol therefore cannot bind them; the West Chronometry Vault counters that the North-West Spiral's own instrument of contest, filed in the same year, waived the objection by implication. Both positions are recorded, both are unrefuted, and the North-West Spiral has been assessed the ordinary annual fee for a contest it does not concede to exist.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal disagreement among archivists concerns whether a Protocol, once struck, is a fact about the Tower or merely a fact about the offices that struck it. The Dialectical Archivists hold that a contested jurisdiction is a real attribute of the disputed thing and must be described in its catalogue entry as such — that a floor is, in a defensible sense, partly governed by each claimant until the contest closes. The Dialectical Containment Bureau holds the opposite: that jurisdiction is an administrative fiction which attaches to offices and never to things, and that describing a floor as contested is a category error of the kind the Floors of Contested Reality were established to contain.

The disagreement grew sharp enough in the winter of the ninth recension that the two bodies sought a dedicated arbitration floor, which was granted and became the Seventh Annex of Dialectical Tension. The Annex has heard the question eleven times and has not decided it, on each occasion ruling that the Protocol is validly struck and that the question of what it means is reserved. Both bodies regard the reservation as a victory, which is perhaps why it has never been lifted.

Related instruments and known confusions

The Protocol is frequently confused with the Vex Anchor Protocol and with Protocol Embedment, neither of which is a jurisdictional instrument, though both have been struck under the Protocol's seal by clerks working late. The Edict of Tangled Jurisdiction governs overlapping claims generally and supersedes the Protocol only where the Edict is expressly invoked; it never has been.

Three matters are conventionally listed as pending under the Protocol:

• The Looped Hour, whose representatives contest the Committee for Linear Time on a contest that recurs, by its own account, every hour.
• The "ambiguous vocalizations" of the silent stair, disputed by the Sultanate of the Silent Stair on the ground that its mandate covers enforced silence and not unauthorized sound.
• The Western Appendage to Sub-basement Gamma, entered twice in the Central Log under two different designations, neither withdrawn.

Filings against a floor's own notice board are not accepted. The nails, once driven, are not evidence of a contest and should not be counted in the register.