Silent Review

Silent Review is the collective designation for a family of curial and judicial procedures in which a matter is examined at length but not spoken of during examination. It is distinguished from ordinary Review by the suppression of the deliberative record: in a Silent Review the examiners hear, read, and weigh, but the proceedings themselves generate no transcript, and the participants' remarks are held to have been made "to the room and not to the file" (Eleventh Concordance, Annex 2). The practice is among the most frequently invoked and least frequently completed procedures in the Tower.

Origins and authority

Silent Review is generally traced to the Sealing Committee Review of Year of the Archive 604, in which the Committee, having spent nine months on a dispute over the binding of the eastern registers, concluded that the dispute could not be resolved aloud without creating a record that would itself become disputable. The Committee adopted a standing rule that its later sessions would be held "in a manner producing nothing that may be cited" — a formula reproduced verbatim in the Third Concordance, Article 9, and again, with the word "nothing" altered to "no thing," in the Concordance of the Ninth Aperture. The alteration has never been explained and is treated as substantive by some chambers and as a scribal error by others.

Authority to convene a Silent Review rests with the Committee of Permanent Review, which delegates in practice to the Committee for Ontological Review where the subject is a thing rather than an act. The Bureau of Custodial Strain Review may declare a Silent Review "silent" in the second degree, thereby suppressing even the fact of suppression — a power it has exercised eleven times since Year of the Archive 1101, and which the Court of Silent Review has twice declined to review on the ground that no record existed to review.

Procedure

A Silent Review opens with a single spoken submission, not exceeding one hundred and forty words, delivered by the convening officer and struck from memory by the clerk on duty as soon as it is complete. There is no reply. The examiners then confer without minutes; a bell is rung when they have finished, and the clerk writes only the bell's hour and the word "concluded" or, where the examiners could not agree, "adjourned without voice."

The Court of Silent Review applies this form to appeals arising from the Court of Silent Loads, permitting neither party to speak after opening submissions. Practice varies sharply between chambers: the Chandlers' Guild maintains that any discrepancy exceeding 0.5% between an examiner's written reckoning and their spoken submission necessitates a full review of the review, while the Board of Equitable Review holds that such a discrepancy can only be established where a record exists, and that a Silent Review therefore cannot generate one.

Notarial practice is equally unsettled. A Pre-Review Documentation file opened for a Silent Review is customarily bound in grey and left with its final gathering unstitched, so that no page can be alleged to have been completed. Clerks are instructed not to initial the last leaf. During the winter of Year of the Archive 1147, the Directorate of Cartographic Review returned four hundred and six such files to the sub-basement of Spiral 771-E on the ground that the loose gathering constituted an unsealed void; the matter was referred onward and, by general consent, not spoken of again.

The Unrecord of Clerk Amsel Vey

The best-documented case of the form is the so-called Unrecord of Clerk Amsel Vey, who served as minute-keeper to the Committee Review from Year of the Archive 1122 to 1146. Vey kept a private "shadow log" of the sessions she had been enjoined not to minute, on the reasoning — set out in her own prefatory note — that a record which is never read is not a record, and that a log kept but not consulted was therefore not prohibited. The log ran to nine folios and recorded that in the majority of sessions it fell to the examiners to discuss what, precisely, had been discussed; that in twenty-three instances no one could recall whether a vote had been taken; and that on one occasion in the spring of 1138 the bell was not rung at all, the examiners having dispersed for the evening without concluding anything.

"They could not tell me what they had decided, and could tell me the hour it was decided, and did not think the two answers in conflict."

— Amsel Vey, shadow log, folio 4 (admitted as evidence in her appeal, Year of the Archive 1148)

Vey's log was discovered after her retirement by a shelver conducting an unrelated count. On appeal, the Court of Silent Review held the log inadmissible; the Court of Silenced Appeals reversed on the ground that the log had never been read during the review and was therefore, strictly, not part of it. The ruling is reported in the fourth recension of the Audit and Review and is cited chiefly for its closing observation that "a silence maintained in error is indistinguishable, on the face of it, from a silence maintained by design."

Scholarly disagreement

The persistent controversy concerns whether a Silent Review produces any operative outcome at all. The conventional view, following the Eleventh Concordance, is that the review accomplishes a change of status in the subject — which becomes "reviewed" — without any record of the change. The contrary reading, advanced at length by the Committee of Permanent Review and adopted by the Committee for Ontological Review in its ruling of Year of the Archive 1159, holds that no status may attach to a subject whose review cannot be cited, so that a completed Silent Review leaves the subject exactly as it found it. A Substantive Review is often sought in the aftermath of either reading, and the Court of Silent Review upholds the principle of reliable internal references as the reason.

The reading has practical consequences. Under the Silent Shelving Period applied to the Archive of Particular Noons from Year of the Archive 1142, a retrieval request requires a thirty-day review; where the review is silent, the thirty days are held by the Archive's keepers to have run from the date of the request and to have left no trace — a position the Archive has maintained through four challenges and one fire.

Use outside the courts

The form has been adopted by bodies with no judicial function. The Silent College conducts the classification of specimens such as Specimen 881-1901 under Silent Review, and the Incident of the Silent Cypress is generally understood to have arisen from a siting decision taken in silent session, of which no one can now say who convened it. Silent Review is also invoked in Review Triggers to suppress the trigger event itself, and, by long custom, at the reopening of any floor under Review of Floor Stability.

Examiners under Silent Review are permitted to take refreshment, provided that the cups are removed before the bell.

The Committee for Ontological Review disputed the Census Bureau's methodology for counting silent proceedings as recently as Year of the Archive 1171, on the ground that the Bureau's figure of 31,000 annual Silent Reviews included reviews that had never been convened; the Bureau replied that it counted these exactly as it counted all others.