What Is a Statute of Limitations? Why Old Claims and Crimes Expire

Limitation periods serve the defendant and the court. A defendant sued twenty years after the event cannot find the receipt, the witness or the memory that would have answered the claim, and a court asked to decide it is deciding on guesswork; the rule also encourages claimants to act promptly and lets everyone else arrange their affairs on the assumption that the past is closed. Roman law had prescription periods, the English Limitation Act of 1623 set the first general ones, and the modern English scheme is in the Limitation Act 1980; every American state and every civil-law country has its own table of periods, and they differ in detail and agree in principle.

The English table, which is representative:

• •Six years for most contract and tort claims, running from the breach or the damage
• •Three years for personal injury, running from the injury or from the date the claimant knew of it
• •Twelve years for claims on a deed and for recovering land, which is also the period after which a squatter in possession may acquire the title
• •One year for defamation
• •Fifteen years as a long stop for latent damage, such as a building defect, however late it was discovered
• •No limit at all for most serious crimes, since England, unlike most countries, has no general criminal limitation period, though summary offences must be charged within six months

The hard question is not how long but from when. The general rule is that time runs from when the cause of action accrues, the breach or the injury, but a person cannot sue for a harm they do not know of, so the law postpones the start in cases of concealment, fraud and latent injury: a person exposed to asbestos in 1970 who developed the disease in 2010 has three years from the diagnosis, not from the exposure, and a claimant who was deceived has six years from discovering the deceit. Time does not run against a child until they turn eighteen or against a person who lacks mental capacity, and a court may extend a personal injury period where it is fair to. In the United States the discovery rule does the same work, and the differences between states in how it applies are a large part of American litigation.

Most countries set limitation periods for crimes as well, graded by seriousness, five years for a theft, ten or twenty for serious violence, and none for murder; Germany, France and most American states run this way, and the American federal rule is five years for most offences. Murder is unlimited almost everywhere, on the ground that the gravity of the crime outweighs the staleness of the evidence, and crimes against humanity, genocide and war crimes are unlimited by international convention since 1968, which is how men in their nineties have been tried for what they did in the camps. England is the outlier that has no period for any indictable offence, which lets historical cases be brought after decades, and which has produced trials for offences fifty years old and the argument about whether they should be.

The largest reform of the last generation followed the recognition that survivors of childhood sexual abuse often do not disclose it for decades, so that a limitation period running from the abuse, or even from adulthood, barred nearly every claim. Since the 2000s, states in the United States, Australia and Canada and several European countries have abolished or greatly extended the civil periods for such claims, and some have opened windows in which any old claim could be brought, which produced the litigation that bankrupted dioceses and the Boy Scouts; Scotland abolished the period for childhood abuse claims in 2017, and England leaves it to the court's discretion, which is usually exercised in the claimant's favour. The arguments for the clock, the lost evidence and the settled expectations, are the same as ever, and the answer in this case has been that the harm of barring the claim is worse.

A statute of limitations is the law that bars a claim or a prosecution after a fixed time, six years for most English civil claims, three for injury and twelve for land, because evidence decays and the past must at some point be closed. The clock starts when the harm occurs or, for hidden harm, when it is discovered, and stops for children and the incapacitated; most countries also limit prosecutions except for murder and crimes against humanity, England limits almost none, and the periods for childhood abuse have been abolished or extended across the common-law world.