Taxonomic Arbitration Panel

The Taxonomic Arbitration Panel is a standing five-member body of the Librarians convened to resolve disputes of classification — cases in which two or more floors assert, or decline, jurisdiction over the same subject. It is the oldest continuously seated panel in the Tower, having opened its first session on Floor 719 in the year recorded as 4 C.E. (Concordant Era), and it is the only such body whose rulings are entered directly into the primary folios rather than forwarded to the Spiral Integrity Oversight Panel for inscription. Its rulings are styled Findings of Taxonomic Settlement and are binding on all floors except Floor 1024, where the Panel on Ontological Overlap retains concurrent authority.

Mandate and jurisdiction

The Panel's authority derives from Fourth Concordance, Annex 9, which grants it power to "determine, finally and without appeal, which floor shall have the keeping of a thing, and whether that thing be a specimen, a practice, or a noise." The formula is broader than it looks. Roughly a third of the Panel's docket consists of subjects that are not objects at all: disputed silences, contested draft-draughts, and on one occasion a smell that two floors had separately catalogued and a third had declared non-existent.

The Panel does not adjudicate the merit of rival classifications, only their competence. A subject may be poorly catalogued and still remain where it is. This restraint is deliberate and is set out in the Panel's own Standing Note of 4 C.E., which reads in part:

"The Panel is not asked which arrangement is wise. It is asked which arrangement is already underway, and the Tower has never yet profited from interrupting one."

— Standing Note of the Taxonomic Arbitration Panel, clause 2

Composition and seating

Five members sit: three drawn from the senior Librarians, one from the Office of Concordant Arbitration, and one — by long custom rather than written rule — from the floor whose competence is under challenge, who attends without vote and who is expected to say nothing unless asked. The Panel's presiding member holds the title of Presiding Taxonomic Arbiter, an office currently recorded as vacant pending the resolution of a seating dispute dating to 4 C.E. and still before the Adjudicatory Panel on Cyclical Review. In the interim the Panel has been chaired by the most senior member present, a practice the Librarians have declined to formalize.

Quorum is three. The Panel has twice sat with two members in the belief that quorum had been met; both rulings were later upheld on the grounds that the absent members would have agreed.

The 4 C.E. session and the Long Docket

The Panel convened on 11 March 4 C.E. with a docket of forty-one matters and adjourned on 3 December 4 C.E. with the same docket, forty of the matters having been found to belong to one another and consolidated into a single item, which was then found to be out of order for consolidation. The consolidated item — a question of whether the Department of Vertical Arbitration or the Board of Concordant Arbitration had competence over a subject that both had declined — could not be heard, because declining competence is not a determination of competence and the Panel had no original jurisdiction over a refusal. The item remains on the docket. It is Item 7, and it has been Item 7 in every session since.

The Panel's clerk of that session, Melisande Orr, recorded a formal grievance in the margin of the minute-book in which she observed that "the docket does not shorten; it merely develops." Her grievance was never answered. It was, however, indexed, and the index entry was later the subject of an arbitration before the Panel itself (Item 22, disposed).

Relationship with other bodies

Where taxonomic dispute turns on a matter of fact, the Panel defers to the Panel for Autochthonous Anomalies. Where it turns on a matter of purity, it defers to the Panel of Ontological Purity. Where it turns on both, the Panel has adopted the practice of hearing the matter itself and deferring afterwards, a sequence the Panel of Harmonization once described in its own minutes as "efficient, and more than a little circular." The Panel on Ontological Overlap, permanently seated on Floor 1024, is the only body with which the Panel's jurisdiction overlaps, and the two have agreed — in a joint memorandum the Panel has never been able to locate a copy of — that overlap cases go to Floor 1024 and everything else comes here.

The Panel is sometimes confused with the Adjudication Panel, which hears Concordance Arbitration and issues Findings of Concordance. The distinction is one of subject: an Adjudication Panel decides what a document means; the Taxonomic Arbitration Panel decides where a thing lives. On the six occasions when both questions have arisen in the same matter, the Panel has waited.

Criticism and the Bassinger question

The Panel's critics — chiefly the Meta-Inquisitorial Panel, which has no jurisdiction over it and mentions the fact at length — argue that a body which decides only which floor keeps a subject, and never what the subject is, cannot prevent a subject from being kept in two places at once. The Panel has answered this in its standing reply, which is that a subject kept in two places at once is two subjects, and that the Panel is therefore not required to act.

The reply is generally regarded as conclusive and universally resented. In the celebrated matter of Bassinger's Cloak, a garment catalogued in 4 C.E. on three separate floors, the Panel ruled that no arbitration was necessary, the three cloaks being distinct. Two of the three floors accepted the ruling. The third declined to accept it and was found, in a subsequent proceeding, to have declined competently. The cloaks are now catalogued as distinct, and are understood by the floor staffs concerned to be one cloak.

Visitors to the Panel's chamber on Floor 719 are asked not to lean on the north wall. The chamber has no other seating.

See also

• Taxonomic protocols
• Taxonomic Collapse
• Protocol for Interstitial Grievance Arbitration (7th Revision)
• Triplicate Waybill
• Verification Arbitration