Senior Assessor Valen

Senior Assessor Valen is the presiding officer of the Fourth Bench of the Assessors, a post she has held since Tower Year 6291 and one that is frequently confused, in correspondence and in the reading-room indices alike, with the several other offices bearing the name Valen. She is not the Chief Cartographer of Ephemeral Phenomena (that is Valen Karr), nor the head of Division VI (that is Valen of Division VI), nor the Arch-Assessor. The distinction is set out at length in Circular 44-B on the Distinguishing of Vālens, which Senior Assessor Valen has declined to endorse on the ground that it spells her name wrong.

Tenure and jurisdiction

The Fourth Bench hears matters of unclaimed attribution: objects, formulae, and occasionally whole stairwells whose ownership two or more floors contest. Its standing is unusual in that it was created by amendment rather than by founding charter, and its authority therefore rests entirely on Concordance 118 on the Seating of Benches, clause 6, which grants the Fourth Bench jurisdiction over "such disputes as the Third Bench has declined, and such as the Third Bench has not yet declined but is expected to."

Valen has interpreted the clause narrowly and then, on two celebrated occasions, not narrowly at all. Her ruling in Stairwell 18 against Stairwell 19 (6294) awarded the disputed landing to neither party and placed it in receivership under the Bureau of Static Inventory, where it remains. The Bureau has filed nine annual requests for its release. None has been answered.

The Doctrine of Prior Silence

Valen's most cited contribution to Tower jurisprudence is the doctrine of prior silence, first stated in her 6296 ruling on the Affair of the Two Inventories: that where two offices each claim to have catalogued a thing, the office that recorded it second holds the stronger claim, because the first office's silence on why it waited is itself a defect in the record. The doctrine is elegant, counter-intuitive, and has never been applied without objection.

"The earlier hand is not the better hand. It is only the earlier. Where the earlier hand cannot say what detained it, the later hand inherits the presumption."

— Senior Assessor Valen, ruling of 6296, recorded in Bureau of Static Inventory, Register 9, folio 212

The doctrine has since been adopted by the Assessor of Kinships in three gallery-affinity disputes, where it has produced results its author has publicly called "regrettable but correct."

Dispute with the Office of Material Coherence

Valen's relations with the Office of Material Coherence have been strained since the winter of 6297, when her bench stayed the reclassification of forty-one objects on Floor 209 pending a hearing on whether they had ever been classified in the first place. The Office argued that a thing cannot be declassified if it was never classified, and that the stay was therefore void on its face. Valen replied that if the objects had never been classified, the Office had no standing to reclassify them, and that the stay was accordingly the only lawful instrument available to either party. Both positions were later incorporated, unamended and contradictory, into the Seventy-Seventh Clarification and its annex — the annex on which First Reader Valen subsequently established the Valen Axiom, a document Senior Assessor Valen has described as "addressed to someone else."

The forty-one objects remain stayed. Two of them have since been lost, which the Office regards as vindication and the Bench as an unrelated matter.

Method and staff

The Fourth Bench sits with three clerks, a recorder, and a sealer named Penelope of the Dry Quill, whose seals are accepted in every chamber except the Ninth, and in the Ninth on Thursdays. Valen is known for hearing argument in silence and ruling from memory, a practice the Senior Librarian Presidium has twice asked her to discontinue and twice declined to press. Her bench keeps no minutes of its deliberations; the rulings are written afterwards, from recollection, in the antechamber. Asked at the Assessors' annual convocation of 6299 how she reconciled this with Concordance 9 on the Keeping of Records, she replied that the Fourth Bench keeps records, and that it keeps them later.

Her one recorded prohibition is that no one may bring a candle into the antechamber. The reason is not stated in any surviving document.

Assessment

Senior Assessor Valen is generally regarded as the most careful and least predictable of the sitting Assessors, and the disagreement over her legacy is a live one. The Historiographers' Chapter maintains that her doctrine of prior silence is a temporary expedient that will be overturned within a generation; the Chapter of Recensions holds that it is already Tower law and has simply not been told. Both chapters cite the same three rulings, and the rulings do not settle the question. A fourth ruling, handed down in 6301 and understood by no one, is expected to.