Resolution Deferral

Resolution Deferral is the administrative interval, recognised in Tower practice but nowhere defined in positive terms, between the issuance of a Resolution and the moment at which that Resolution is said to have taken effect. It is distinct from Passive Deferral, which suspends matters prior to resolution, and from the status conferred upon items held in the Pending Resolution Vaults, which are deferred before any writ has been drafted at all. Resolution Deferral applies only after a Resolution Writ has been sealed and entered, and concerns not whether the Resolution exists but when. The interval is measured from the date of sealing and has no stated maximum.

Doctrinal basis

The practice rests on the Third Concordance, Clause 3, which grants the Librarians authority to defer the administrative or judicial status of a matter notwithstanding that the matter has been formally resolved. Read narrowly, Clause 3 permits deferral of status while the Resolution itself proceeds; read broadly, as it has been read in the drafting halls since at least the recension of 4 Echyr, it permits the Resolution to be complete in every respect except consequence.

Concordance 19-xi, "On the Nature of Deferral", is frequently cited in support of both readings and settles neither. Its most-quoted sentence is a model of the difficulty:

"A thing deferred is not a thing undone, nor yet a thing done; it is a thing held, and the holding is itself a kind of doing."

— Concordance 19-xi, Article 2

The Scroll of Perpetual Deferral supplies the theoretical foundation, and the Manual of Perpetual Deferral the procedural machinery, though the Manual addresses Resolution Deferral only obliquely, among its forty-seven sub-classes of pending status. Sub-class 31, "resolved but not yet arrived", is generally taken to be the operative entry.

Instruments and procedure

Resolution Deferral is enacted by Deferral Certificates, appended to the reverse of the Resolution Writ and countersigned by the office that issued the writ. A Certificate must name the Resolution it defers, the ground of deferral, and the anticipated date of arrival. The third particular is advisory. Certificates bearing anticipated dates more than nine years past have been accepted without comment; the oldest continuously renewed Certificate on record, attached to a Writ of Floor 1890 concerning a boundary dispute between two scriptoria, has carried the anticipated date "next quarter" since the winter of 6 Echyr.

Arrival is certified separately, by Resolution Status annotation, and it is at this stage that most disputes arise. An annotation must be entered by an officer of equal or higher standing to the officer who sealed the original Writ. Since standing is not recorded in any single register, and the registers of the Protocols of Cessation and of the drafting halls disagree on the ranking of at least fourteen grades, a Resolution Deferral may remain open for the sole reason that no one can establish who is entitled to close it.

The Tammerand grievance

The clearest illustration remains the grievance lodged in the ninth year of the present administration by Clerk Tammerand of the third drafting hall, who had been issued a Resolution in her own favour confirming her right of way through a service corridor on Floor 1890. The Resolution was sealed, entered, and immediately deferred, at her own request, pending completion of repairs to the corridor floor. The repairs were completed. The deferral was not lifted, because the officer empowered to annotate Resolution Status had in the interim been reassigned, and the reassignment had been effected by a Resolution that was itself deferred.

Tammerand petitioned for eleven years. Her final submission, a model of restraint, observed that "the corridor is now in better condition than at any time within living memory, and I am no closer to walking down it" (Petition 4471, third drafting hall). The petition was granted in principle and the grant deferred. The corridor remains closed to her. She continues to file, and her filings are catalogued under Cataloguing Dispute Resolution on the ground that their subject is the record rather than the corridor.

Scholarly disagreement

Two positions predominate. The suspensive school holds that Resolution Deferral suspends the Resolution entirely: a deferred Resolution has no force, creates no rights, and may be treated as though unwritten. On this view Tammerand has no right of way and never had one. The accrual school holds that the Resolution takes full effect at sealing and that only its enforcement is deferred, so that Tammerand's right exists perfectly and is merely unexercisable.

The distinction is not academic. Under the suspensive reading, a deferred Resolution may be superseded by a later Resolution on the same matter, since there is nothing extant to supersede. Under the accrual reading, it may not, and the later Resolution is a nullity. The Edicts of Mediate Resolution adopt the accrual view; the Manual of Perpetual Deferral appears to assume the suspensive view throughout its annexes without ever stating it. The Third Concordance, Annex Gamma, is silent on the question but requires that the deferring instrument be framed as a question, and a question, it notes, "may be left open indefinitely without prejudice to either answer".

Relationship to adjacent practices

Resolution Deferral is frequently confused with Post-Resolution Monitoring and with Resolution Drafting, both of which occupy neighbouring ground. Monitoring follows arrival and concerns the Resolution's effects; drafting precedes sealing and concerns its form. A matter in Resolution Deferral is neither monitored nor drafted. It is, in the phrase of the Protocols of Cessation, "resolved in form and suspended in operation", and those who administer it are instructed to treat it as settled for the purposes of conversation and unsettled for the purposes of the register.

Deferrals may be renewed without limit. They may not be renewed in the same ink twice consecutively, a provision introduced after the Ink Riot of Floor 1890 and never rescinded. A Deferral Certificate is not to be carried through the reading rooms while wet.