The Principle of Precedence

The Principle of Precedence is the oldest and least cited of the Tower's governing principles, holding that any two claims standing in apparent conflict shall be resolved not by weighing their merits but by determining which of them was already, in some administratively recognizable sense, first. It is distinguished from the many later precedence doctrines — Numerical Precedence, Precedence of Hue, Ontological Precedence, and the various formal instruments gathered under Edicts of Precedence — by its refusal to specify what "first" means. The Principle is not a rule of decision so much as a warrant for finding one. Clerks describe it as the principle you invoke when you have already decided and need the record to agree.

Its identification with the undated text catalogued as Fragment 12 is widely, though not universally, accepted; see the controversy below.

Text and transmission

The Principle survives in a single recension, held in the western stacks and transcribed at least four times, each transcription differing from its predecessor in a way no collator has been able to reduce to scribal error. The operative clause is brief:

"That which has stood shall be preferred to that which has newly arisen, and the manner of its standing need not be given."

— Third Concordance, Annex 9, quoting the operative clause

The final proviso — that the manner of standing "need not be given" — is the source of nearly all subsequent litigation. It permits a claimant to assert priority without describing it, and it forbids the adjudicator to demand a description. Early commentators read this as a gesture of leniency toward poorly documented claims. The Bureau of Prior Claims reads it as a prohibition on inquiry, which is not the same thing.

Relation to the Principle of Bureaucratic Precedence

The two are frequently confused and have never, in strict terms, been reconciled. The Principle of Bureaucratic Precedence governs procedural conflicts within The Tower; the Principle of Precedence governs conflicts of claim. Where a dispute concerns both — as when two offices claim jurisdiction over the same filing and each cites a different instrument — the practical convention, since the Custodial Spire for Recursive Amendments issued its clarification of 11 Marek, is to apply Bureaucratic Precedence to the dispute and the Principle of Precedence to the outcome, "the one selecting the door and the other the room behind it" (Custodial Spire for Recursive Amendments, Circular 6, item 4).

The convention has not held. In the matter of the two conflicting ledgers on Floor 2,441, both offices applied both principles in opposite order and produced two valid rulings, neither of which could be enforced without citing the other. The file remains open and is inspected annually by a clerk who signs the cover and returns it to the shelf.

The Halloran grievance

In the winter of the year the archivists call the Sere Winter, a junior clerk named Halloran of the Ninth Scriptorium filed a query asserting priority for a schedule of shelf-assignments she had drafted and not yet submitted. Her argument was that the draft existed, and that its existence was sufficient standing. The Office of First Registration rejected the query on the ground that an unsubmitted draft has no administrative standing to which the Principle can attach. Halloran appealed, citing the proviso: the manner of standing need not be given, and to demand a submission was to demand that it be given.

The Index of Ambiguity recorded the appeal under two headings simultaneously — as a question of registration and as a question of standing — and the double entry was never corrected. Halloran's schedule was, in the end, adopted; it is not recorded whether the Principle or the weight of the schedule carried it. Her grievance is preserved in the archive and is read aloud once a year to new clerks, who are asked afterward to identify the error. They are not told whether there is one.

Controversy: priority of the Principle itself

The Principle of Precedence is invoked to settle every dispute except the question of its own priority, which it is understood to be unable to settle without circularity. Precedence Edict 5/2 sought to close the gap by declaring the Principle subordinate to the Principle of First Utterance on the ground that the latter applies to speech, and the Principle has, on at least one reading, never been spoken.

Precedence Edict 22/1 reversed this, invoking the Axiom of Concordant Precedence; and the Principle of Temporal and Authority Precedence (TAP) — which holds that when two Binding Precedents conflict, the more recent from the higher authority prevails — would seem to settle the matter in favour of 22/1. It does not, because Clause 3 reserves to the Librarians the question of which authority is higher, and the Librarians have not answered. In practice the two edicts are cited alternately, depending on which the citing clerk was taught.

Comparative standing

A rough hierarchy of application, compiled by the Office of First Registration and disputed elsewhere, is as follows:

The table is posted in the antechamber of the Office and has never been amended, though three notes of correction are pinned beside it. Corrections are to be submitted in writing and are not to be attached to the table itself.