The Petitions of Perpetual Review

The Petitions of Perpetual Review are the formal instruments by which a holding already under the Doctrine of Perpetual Review may be reopened, supplemented, or — in the rarest cases — permitted to lapse. They are lodged with the Vault of Perpetual Review and examined in the Hall of Perpetual Review, and they are distinct from the Petitions of Ontological Precedent, which concern whether a holding ever properly existed, and from the Petitions of Apparent Isness, which concern whether it may be re-described. A Petition of Perpetual Review concedes the holding's existence and asks only that the scrutiny of it be continued differently.

The distinction is not pedantic. It has cost the archive considerably.

Form and lodgement

A petition is entered on a quadruplicate schedule, bound in grey, and carried by hand to the intake desk of the Annex of Perpetual Review, where it is date-stamped at both ends. Petitioners must surrender all writing implements at the threshold; the reason for this has never been minuted. Each sheet bears the spiral marking of its floor of origin and, where applicable, the aperture marking of the chamber in which the holding was first catalogued. The customary fee is one recension of the Edict of Perpetual Review, not necessarily a current one.

The Hall recognises three standing forms of petition: the Simple Continuance, by which a holding's scrutiny is extended a further term without alteration; the Supplementary Continuance, which attaches new corroborative material; and the Third Form, which asks that a holding be allowed to lapse from active review. The Third Form is received, stamped, and, by long custom, set aside. No Third Form has been granted since the Committee for Ontological Review declined one on a technicality in the winter of floor 6,118, and the Committee's reasoning on that occasion ran to forty pages, of which only the first has ever been read aloud.

The Question of Standing

Who may petition is the subject of the archive's most durable quarrel. Annex XII to the Third Concordance grants standing to "any party with an interest in the holding's continued scrutiny, whether or not that party is the holding itself" — a formulation wide enough, as the Annex of Perpetual Revision observed in its Marginalia, to admit the weather. Annex XIX to the same Concordance restricts standing to offices of record and to the holding's original cataloguer, "whose name shall be regarded as sufficient." The two annexes have never been reconciled, and both remain in force.

"Where the instrument and the annex disagree, the annex governs; where two annexes disagree, neither governs, and the petition proceeds."

— Concordance of Petitions, Recension 4, clause 9

In practice the ambiguity has been productive. The clerk-adjudicator Fenner Ostlowe, who held the intake desk on floor 6,114 for eleven years, developed the habit of admitting petitions from parties who could not be identified at all, on the reasoning that a party who cannot be identified cannot be shown to lack standing. His successor reversed this in a memorandum of the following year, and the memorandum was itself petitioned against. The petition was granted. Ostlowe's practice was reinstated by a route no one has since reconstructed, though the Court of Silent Review has upheld it twice without comment.

The Corroborative Review procedure

Petitions of the Supplementary kind are routed through the Corroborative Review procedure administered out of the Hall of Perpetual Review, a process under which the new material is read against the holding in the presence of three officers and one recorder who does not speak. The recorder's silence is procedural and not, as is sometimes supposed, devotional; a recorder who speaks is required to begin again on a fresh schedule, and the resulting delays have ended at least one career. The Gallery of Precedential Review holds the indexes by which a petitioner may locate prior Corroborative outcomes, arranged by floor and then by supplicant, and complete only as far as floor 4,900.

Relationship to Perpetual Provisional Status

A petition may also seek Perpetual Provisional Status for a holding not yet ripe for full review. This is the most common use of the instrument and the least discussed. A grant of provisional status suspends the holding in a half-catalogued condition that is neither reviewed nor shelved, and holdings in this condition are said to be "present through absence," an expression drawn from the corollary of the same name. The Office of Perpetual Affairs administers transitions between provisional and full status, and its files on the subject are consistent, complete, and largely unread.

Criticism and inventory

The instrument's critics argue that it multiplies scrutiny without resolving it. The Department of Perpetual Motion has twice filed objections to the petition's phrasing of "continued review," on the ground that review which continues does not review. Both objections were accepted and both were filed as petitions, in accordance with the procedure they objected to.

The Vault's own inventory of petition classes, as of the last complete count, is as follows:

• Simple Continuance — 41,209 open
• Supplementary Continuance — 18,660 open
• Third Form — 1,702 open, 1 granted (see committee minute, floor 6,118)

The inventory is revised annually. It has never once been revised downward.