Parliamentary authority

A parliamentary authority is a book of rules on conducting business in deliberative assemblies. A group generally creates its own rules and then adopts such a book to cover meeting procedure not covered in its rules. Different books have been used by organizations and by legislative assemblies.

A parliamentary authority is a book of rules on conducting business in deliberative assemblies. A group generally creates its own rules and then adopts such a book to cover meeting procedure not covered in its rules. This set of rules is called parliamentary procedure. Rules in a parliamentary authority can be superseded by the group's constitution or bylaws or by adopted procedural rules (with a few exceptions). The adopted procedural rules may be called special rules of order.

Assemblies that do not adopt a parliamentary authority may use an existing parliamentary authority by custom, or may consider themselves governed by the “common parliamentary law”, or “common law of parliamentary procedure”. A society that has adopted bylaws that do not designate a parliamentary authority may adopt one by the same vote required to adopt special rules of order. A mass meeting can adopt a parliamentary authority by a majority vote. The book, Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised, states, “In matters on which an organization's adopted parliamentary authority is silent, provisions found in other works on parliamentary law may be persuasive – that is, they may carry weight in the absence of overriding reasons for following a different course – but they are not binding on the body.”

A poll by Jim Slaughter surveyed North American Certified Professional Parliamentarians (CPPs) in 1999 to ask what percent of clients used each parliamentary authority. The results were published in 2000 in Parliamentary Journal, the official journal of the American Institute of Parliamentarians: 90 percent used Robert's Rules of Order Newly Revised (RONR), 8 percent used The Standard Code of Parliamentary Procedure (formerly Sturgis, now AIPSC), and 3 percent used some other authority, including Demeter's Manual of Parliamentary Law and Procedure (Demeter), Riddick's Rules of Procedure (Riddick/Butcher), Bourinot's Rules of Order (Bourinot), and Rules of Order (Davis). Bourinot was used in Canada.

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