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 often none for murder; Germany and most American states run this way, while France allows twenty years, 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.

DNA evidence created a new problem for limitation periods. In American states with time limits for rape and other serious crimes, forensic laboratories began identifying genetic profiles from old evidence kits when the deadline for prosecution had passed or was close to passing, with no name attached to the profile. Some prosecutors responded by charging the DNA profile itself, filing an indictment against an unknown person described by their genetic code, which stops the clock until a match is found. Many states have since written DNA exceptions into their statutes, so that the period runs from the moment a suspect is identified rather than from the crime.

The clock also matters in ordinary money matters. In England, a debt that goes unpaid for six years normally becomes unenforceable through the courts, but if the debtor acknowledges it in writing or makes a payment before the six years are up, the period starts again from that date. Once the period has fully run out, a later payment does not revive the right to sue. In the United States the rules vary by state, and the trade in very old debts has led regulators to require collectors not to mislead people about whether a debt is too old for them to be sued over it.

Statutes are not the only way the law penalises delay. The old English courts of equity, which granted remedies such as injunctions, developed their own doctrine, called laches, from the maxim that equity helps the vigilant and not those who sleep on their rights. Laches has no fixed period. A judge asks whether the claimant waited unreasonably long and whether that harmed the other side, for instance because witnesses have died or the defendant has spent money relying on things staying as they were. A fairly prompt claim can fail on these grounds, and a slow one can succeed if nobody was prejudiced.

The two ideas can collide. In 2014 the United States Supreme Court heard a case brought by the daughter of a screenwriter whose work lay behind the film Raging Bull. She sued the studio for copyright infringement in 2009, decades after the film's release, and the studio argued that her long delay barred the claim. Because copyright law allows a claim for each new infringement within three years, the court held that laches could not cut off damages for infringements inside that window, although delay might still affect other remedies. The ruling drew a line: where a legislature has set a clock, judges should not shorten it on their own.

After the Second World War, the question of whether Nazi crimes would eventually expire under ordinary limitation rules became urgent. West German law originally set a limitation period for murder, and there was strong pressure not to let it run out while many perpetrators were still alive and unpunished. After repeated extensions, the West German parliament abolished the limitation period for murder entirely in 1979.

Internationally, a United Nations convention adopted in 1968 declared that war crimes and crimes against humanity should not be subject to any time limit, and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court takes the same view. The principle is that some acts are so grave that the passage of time should never protect those responsible.

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.