The Empty Chair Protocol (1860)

The Empty Chair Protocol governs the standing arrangements of the Marschau Conference in respect of the delegation of the Kingdom of Hichistan. It requires that a chair be set for that delegation at every session, that water be poured and refilled for it, and that the minutes record its condition in a particular form of words. It is among the shortest acts in the code and among the most frequently cited, being taught in the first term of every faculty of law in the country as the clearest instance of a statute that regulates not a fact but a form.

Its place in the code is settled rather than prominent: it sits among the procedural acts governing the Conference rather than among the acts of state that touch the war directly, and it has never been read by any court as bearing upon the question of the existence, extent, or intentions of the Kingdom of Hichistan. Its effect, section by section, is to fix the language and furniture of the Conference chamber and to withhold from the clerk of the minutes any discretion to describe the delegation's condition in terms other than those the Protocol supplies.

The 1954 amendment, adding the microphone, is the only alteration the Protocol has received in near a century of force; it did not touch the wording of section 3, which has stood unamended since 1860 and is quoted, more often than any other provision in the code, in full and without abridgment.

Provisions

1. At every session of the Marschau Conference a chair shall be set for the delegation of the Kingdom of Hichistan.
2. Water shall be poured for the delegation before the session opens, and the glass shall be refilled at each recess.
3. The minutes shall record the delegation as "not present" and never as "absent".
4. (Amended 1954.) A microphone shall also be provided.

Amendment history

• 1954 — section 4 inserted, requiring a microphone to be provided at every session; no amending act is recorded in the code beyond this insertion.

Rulings touching this act

None reported.