Statute of Limitations

The concept of the statute of limitations is deceptively simple. In the popular mind, the term refers to the amount of time during which a plaintiff may pursue a cause of civil action in court or, in criminal law, the amount of time that must elapse before a defendant is legally excused from the criminal liability associated with a crime. It is of course a truism of television courtroom drama (and the law, as it happens) that there is no statute of limitations on murder. But as will become clearer in the course of this report, the principal concern of the concept of the statute of limitations has always been connected far more to property and its ownership than to responsibility and its ownership.

As a legal concept, statutes of limitation have a complex heritage, dating back to the ancient period, and an even more complex manner of application in different cultures. References to limitation of actions date as early as the Roman period, in connection with laws of inheritance, which were of course related to laws of property. And it is out of

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he feudal period in England, says Hogue, was shaped by the desire of medieval men to protect the status of the family and to insure as best they could the continuity of the family by providing for it an adequate economic base. Common-law courts were responsive to this widespread concern to secure the devolution of property. Insofar as possible, inheritance was to be indefeasible. But . . . [t]here were limits beyond which the courts would not protect family property from the effects of alienation. As a practical matter, although in feudal England the process was complicated, the rights of tenants in possession could be asserted against the rights of hereditary owners who had failed to exercise any claim on the property. Indeed, Blackstone cites a black-letter law of prescription, promulgated by King Henry III in 1540, to this effect: Formerly a man might, by the common law, have prescribed for a right which had been enjoyed by his ancestors or predecessors at any distance of time, though his or their enjoyment of it has been suspended for an indefinite series of years. But by the statute of limitations, it is enacted, that no person shall make any prescription by the seisin [possession] or possession of his ancestor or pre
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