Re-application

Re-application is the second or subsequent submission of a document, claim, or entity to a reviewing body after an earlier submission has been refused, returned, or found to have been refused before it was submitted. The practice is governed principally by Clause 3, Annex Δ, which formally established Retroactive Contamination as the standard ground for treating a re-application as having occurred whether or not anyone filed one. Re-application is distinguished from Application proper by the requirement that the matter already possess a determination; a first submission that is lost, mislaid, or absorbed into the fabric of a floor does not become a re-application merely by being sent again.

The distinction is older than the terminology. The Third Concordance, Annex 19, refers to "the second asking, and the asking after that" without naming the category, and it was not until the Ninth Concordance that the term appears in the register at all. A note in the margin of the Ninth, in the hand of the archivist Merrow Quill, observes that the omission had caused "eleven years of people calling it the same thing twice."

Procedure and the counting of askings

Re-application proceeds through the same offices as an original application but is entered on a separate ledger, the Register of Second Askings, maintained on floor 2210 since the winter of the year the eastern stairwell iced over and could not be used until the thaw. The Register records, for each matter, the number of prior determinations rather than the number of prior submissions, since the two rarely correspond. Where a determination was itself reached by Retroactive Adjustment, the Register instructs the clerk to enter it twice and to note the discrepancy in the lower margin.

Applicants frequently suppose that a re-application must restate the original grounds. It need not. Under the Concordance of Standing Orders, a re-application "may be submitted in identical terms, in altered terms, or in the form of a sworn statement that the applicant has nothing further to add" (Standing Order 88). The third form is by far the most common and is the only one that cannot be dismissed for insufficiency, which has led the Assessors' Table to complain that it is also the only one that cannot be assessed.

The Tower's holdings on the subject contain one short inventory, reproduced here from the Register's front matter:

• First askings pending: 14,806
• Second askings pending: 22,411
• Second askings pending whose first asking cannot be located: 9,207
• Matters determined without any asking: 3

The Ferrant grievance

In the year the lift on the western side was closed for relining, the clerk Dorothea Ferrant refused a re-application concerning a disputed landing on the grounds that it was a first submission, the original having been returned unfiled with the notation "not received." The applicant appealed, observing that a document returned as "not received" had plainly been received. The Wing of Recursive Application heard the matter and found for the applicant on the reasoning that non-receipt is itself a determination, and that a determination had therefore occurred, making the second document a re-application whatever the first had been. Ferrant's dissent, filed separately and at length, argued that a finding of non-receipt cannot constitute a determination because it denies the very event it determines, and she maintained this position until her transfer, at her own request, to a floor with no applicants on it.

"Where the record says a thing was not received, the record has said something. What it has said may be false; it cannot be nothing."

— The Wing of Recursive Application, ruling of the Ferrant appeal, cited in the Register's preface

Doctrinal dispute

The principal disagreement concerns whether a re-application can precede its original. The Concordance of Procedure holds that it cannot: re-application is defined by its relation to a prior determination, and a relation requires two terms in order (Procedure 12.4). The Concordance of Retroactive Admissions holds the opposite, citing Annex Δ of Clause 3 and noting that its provisions on subjects declared non-extant apply "from the moment the declaration takes effect, which is to say from before it." Under this reading a matter may be re-applied for, refused, and only then applied for the first time, a sequence the Office of Sequential Integrity has described in an internal minute as "not out of order, merely out of sequence."

In practice the question is seldom litigated, because the two Concordances are cited with roughly equal frequency and an office may choose whichever supports the outcome it prefers. The Concordantal Self-Application ruling of the Fourth Recension treated the contradiction as intentional and therefore not a defect, a position no one has since been able to challenge without relying on it.

Records and cross-reference

Re-applications are cross-referenced to their originals by the same series mark, distinguished by a suffixed numeral; a matter re-applied for four times is marked through the fourth suffix, and marks beyond the fourth are not permitted, the clerk being required in that case to open a new series and describe the old one in full on the cover sheet. Six of the Tower's floors hold nothing but these cover sheets. They are among the least visited floors and the most frequently re-applied for.

Re-application should not be confused with Application for Recursive Leave (Ref. #LA-Δ.45), which concerns absences rather than submissions, nor with the Application of Algernon's Theorem, which is a single act and cannot be repeated. Applicants uncertain of the category are advised to submit under both headings; the Tower will return one of them, and the returned one may then serve as a first asking if a re-application is later needed.