The front of it, as the clerk read it to the sitting — slower than anybody wanted, and exactly right:
An Act to provide for the determination of prospective identity continuity and guardianship where the civil record is absent or defective.
What it reaches. This Act applies to the determination of civil status under records that are incomplete, contradictory, or temporally irreconcilable. A determination under this Act may deal with prospective identity continuity; guardianship; date-of-record entries; unresolved birth sequence; residency; the recognition of households; and which civil effects are preserved and which are waived. The list was built on the floor, from the members’ own stretches — a woman with two children and no line anywhere saying which came first, who had been asked to guess by three separate offices.
The standard. In making a determination under this Act, the officer shall have regard to the evidence available; to the continuity of the person’s life as lived; to the welfare of any person affected, and in particular of any child; to testimony given and its sources; and to the prospective legal effect of the determination. No one of these shall govern alone, and the officer shall state in the determination how each was weighed. A household amendment was moved against the five limbs — a rule that says a thing, rather than a rule that asks five questions — and found no seconder that day, and went down in the book with the mover’s reason in his own words. It would carry at a later sitting the same year, once the Act had run long enough for the chamber to see what a determination could reach.
The office. Interim first-instance authority under this Act is vested in the person for the time being holding the office of senior civil registrar of the Cairn, by virtue of that office and not by appointment, until a permanent appointment procedure is enacted. A motion to name somebody instead — in the open, by a vote of the chamber — was seconded and lost, on an argument made from the opposition benches without a raised voice: if this chamber picks who decides the first matter, this chamber has decided it.
What revives. Nothing, unless the officer says so in the determination, in writing, and says why, and puts his name under it. The limb was asked for by the only creditor in the room, off her counter with the chandlery apron still on under her coat, about a debt she had already forgiven. And by amendment moved from the voids and carried on the voices: applications under the Act without fee, and a certified copy of the determination without fee to the person it is about. Not to the houses. To the person.
The promulgation
The certificate took another quarter of an hour, because the Assembly had never certified anything, and the clerk had written to the Warden’s registry a week before to ask how it was done, and had the answer pinned inside the cover of her book. The Chair signed the engrossed text standing. The executive promulgated on signature — and the certified copies went out by the clerk’s own hand, through her receipt book, each counter signing with the hour against it. Registry first, before the post and the sector offices, walked down before the sixth bell.
The registrar who received it — eleven years at his counter — read it twice and said the one thing: that he had put most of the station into that register a line at a time and never once had to write down why he did a thing; that now he would write it every time, in five parts, with his name under it; that it was a great deal more work; and that it was the correct way round.