Most writing on settlement asks whether parties should end a case by agreement. This short study asks a narrower question of public records written for people who go to court without a lawyer: when a case ends by agreement or by a court's proposal, what do the records treat as making the ending hold, and what do they name as a reason to look at it again? It reads the fourteen questions of PRO SE's Courtroom section whose English wording names mediation, conciliation or settlement. PRO SE, a studio of the RISCON family, marks every record synthetic and publishes its library as general information, not legal advice; its editorial reference date is not a case date or a confirmation of current law. Each record gives two readings, a question where a judgment would stand and a condition for looking again.
The records never ask what the parties want from the ending or whether its terms suit them. They ask who stood in the room and with what standing, and in what order that is to be checked; they place the end of a case in what the minutes, the record and the service papers show; and every condition for looking again turns on those papers, on who attended, on an objection, on whether an agreement was formed or on a later step in a suit, never on a party's change of mind. Read beside the debate over settlement and adjudication, the records turn the question of consent into a question of paper. The contribution concerns the form of the records, not the law.