Also known as: time bar · timebar · time-barred · time barred · time-barring
Written by attorneys — see sources below.
A bar to a legal claim arising from the lapse of a defined length of time, especially one contained in a statute of limitations.
Theo Thomas committed an offense in 1998. The original limitations period expired in 2003. In 2004 a legislature enacted a statute extending the period for that offense. Prosecutors charged Thomas under the new statute. The court dismissed the prosecution because the extension violated the Ex Post Facto Clause by reopening a time-barred case.
Tracy Torres filed a multistate libel suit in New Hampshire against a national magazine. The claim would have been time-barred in every other state. New Hampshire's six-year period kept the action alive. The court exercised jurisdiction even though most injuries occurred elsewhere.
Kathy Keeton, a resident of New York who assists in producing a magazine bearing her name in several places crediting her with editorial and other work, sued Hustler Magazine, Inc., an Ohio corporation with its principal place of business in California, in the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire. She alleged jurisdiction by reason of diversity of citizenship and claimed to have been libeled in five separate issues of the magazine published between September 1975 and May 1976. Prior to the New Hampshire action, Keeton had initially brought suit for libel and invasion of privacy in Ohio, where the magazine was published, but her libel claim was dismissed as barred by the Ohio statute of limitations and her invasion-of-privacy claim was dismissed as barred by the New York statute of limitations. Hustler Magazine's contacts with New Hampshire consist of the sale of some 10,000 to 15,000 copies of the magazine in that State each month. Keeton's only connection with New Hampshire is the circulation there of copies of the magazine that she assists in producing. The District Court dismissed her suit because it believed that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbade the application of New Hampshire’s long-arm statute to acquire personal jurisdiction over the respondent. The Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed the dismissal in 1982. The Court of Appeals observed that the single publication rule would require awarding damages caused in all states. It also stressed New Hampshire’s unusually long six-year limitations period for libel actions. New Hampshire was the only State where the suit would not have been time-barred when filed in October 1980. The Supreme Court granted certiorari in 1983.
View caseTitan Industries discovered that a painting stolen decades earlier was held by Tristan Thompson. The museum made a prompt demand for return. Thompson refused. The court held the replevin action timely because the three-year limitations period began only upon refusal, not at the original theft.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation operates the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. In 1937 Solomon R. Guggenheim donated to the museum a Chagall gouache known alternately as Menageries or Le Marchand de Bestiaux, painted in 1912. The museum tracked the painting on accession cards that recorded loans to other institutions, its return after a 1961-1962 loan, its presence in the museum on April 2, 1965, and an undated later notation that the painting could not be located. The museum first realized the gouache was missing sometime in the late 1960s and confirmed the fact during a complete inventory conducted from 1969 to 1970. It did not notify the New York City Police, the FBI, Interpol, other museums, galleries, or artistic organizations of the theft. In 1974 the museum's Board of Trustees voted to deaccession the gouache and remove it from the museum's records. In May 1967 Rachel Lubell and her husband purchased the gouache from the Robert Elkon Gallery for $17,000. The invoice and receipt listed the prior owner as a named individual who later proved to be the museum mailroom employee suspected of the theft. The Lubells displayed the painting in their home for more than twenty years and exhibited it at the Elkon Gallery in 1967 and again in 1981. In 1985 a private art dealer brought a transparency of the painting to Sotheby's for an auction estimate. A person at Sotheby's who had previously worked at the Guggenheim recognized the gouache and notified the museum, which traced the painting to Mrs. Lubell. On January 9, 1986 the museum's director wrote demanding return of the gouache. Mrs. Lubell refused, and the museum commenced this action for recovery of the painting or $200,000 on September 28, 1987. In her answer Mrs. Lubell raised affirmative defenses including the statute of limitations. The trial court granted her cross motion for summary judgment. The Appellate Division modified by dismissing the statute of limitations defense and denying the cross motion for summary judgment, then granted leave and certified the question whether its order was properly made.
View caseTabitha Taylor brought a class action challenging a durational residency rule. Before class certification her individual claim became time-barred under a new statute. The court allowed the class action to proceed because unnamed class members retained live claims unaffected by her personal time bar.
In 1973 the United States Parole Board adopted explicit Parole Release Guidelines that established a customary range of confinement by combining a parole prognosis score with an offense severity rating. On January 25, 1974, respondent John M. Geraghty was convicted in the Northern District of Illinois of conspiracy to commit extortion and making false material declarations to a grand jury and was sentenced to concurrent terms of four years and one year. The Seventh Circuit affirmed the convictions. Geraghty later obtained a reduction of his sentence to 30 months through a Rule 35 motion. Geraghty applied for parole in January 1976 and again in June 1976. Both applications were denied because his offense behavior was rated very high severity, his salient factor score was 11, and the guidelines indicated a range of 26-36 months. He then instituted this civil suit as a class action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, challenging the guidelines as inconsistent with the PCRA and the Constitution, and questioning the procedures by which the guidelines were applied to his case. The case was transferred to the Middle District of Pennsylvania where Geraghty was incarcerated. The district court denied class certification as neither necessary nor appropriate and granted summary judgment for the defendants on all claims. Geraghty appealed to the Third Circuit individually and on behalf of the proposed class. Another prisoner represented by the same counsel moved to intervene. On June 30, 1977, before any briefs were filed, Geraghty was mandatorily released after serving 22 months of his sentence. The Parole Commission moved to dismiss the appeals as moot. The Third Circuit held the litigation was not moot, reversed the denial of class certification, and remanded for further proceedings including evaluation of subclasses. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve the conflict among the courts of appeals on whether a class action challenging parole guidelines becomes moot when the named plaintiff is released from prison while the appeal from denial of class certification is pending.
View caseTimothy Tang sought to join a nationwide asbestos settlement class. Many class members' claims were already time-barred under state law when the class action was filed. The court refused certification because the time-barred claims could not be revived by the class proceeding.
In the early 1990s, the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation transferred all pending federal asbestos cases to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania for pretrial proceedings before Judge Weiner. Attorneys from the Plaintiffs' Steering Committee and the Center for Claims Resolution, a consortium of twenty former asbestos manufacturers, began settlement negotiations that initially addressed pending inventory claims but soon expanded to cover future claims. After CCR settled thousands of inventory plaintiffs' claims for more than $200 million through separate agreements, the parties on January 15, 1993, filed a single-day package. This package consisted of a complaint, answer, proposed settlement stipulation exceeding one hundred pages, and joint motion for conditional class certification in a new action not part of the MDL transfer. The complaint defined the class as all persons in the United States or its territories who had been exposed occupationally or through a spouse or household member to asbestos products attributable to CCR defendants and who had not filed suit as of January 15, 1993. This class encompassed both individuals with manifest diseases such as mesothelioma, lung cancer, and asbestosis and exposure-only individuals with no current symptoms. The group potentially numbered in the hundreds of thousands or millions. The accompanying stipulation created a no-fault administrative compensation matrix with fixed, non-inflation-adjusted award ranges for four disease categories. It imposed numerical caps on extraordinary claims and excluded compensation for medical monitoring, fear of future injury, and loss-of-consortium claims. A three-month opt-out period applied. The District Court conditionally certified the class under Rule 23(b)(3) for settlement purposes only, appointed class counsel, approved an extensive notice plan that reached millions of individuals, conducted fairness hearings, and entered orders finding the settlement fair while enjoining class members from pursuing separate asbestos suits. Objectors appealed, the Third Circuit vacated the certification, and the Supreme Court granted certiorari.
View caseTrevor Tate filed a class action asserting claims subject to a one-year statute of limitations. His own claim became time-barred before certification. The court kept the class action alive because other class members' claims remained timely and unaffected by his personal time bar.
Carol Sosna married Michael Sosna on September 5, 1964, in Michigan. They lived together in New York between October 1967 and August 1971, after which they separated but continued to reside there. In August 1972 Sosna moved to Iowa with her three children. The following month she petitioned the District Court of Jackson County, Iowa, for dissolution of her marriage. Michael Sosna was personally served when he visited Iowa and made a special appearance to contest jurisdiction. The Iowa court dismissed the petition for lack of jurisdiction under Iowa Code § 598.6 because Sosna had not resided in the state for one year preceding the filing. Instead of appealing, Sosna filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Iowa seeking injunctive and declaratory relief on constitutional grounds. A three-judge court was convened pursuant to 28 U.S.C. §§ 2281 and 2284. While the federal action was pending, the Iowa Supreme Court decided In re Marriage of Williams, 217 N.W.2d 202 (1974), and upheld the statute's constitutionality. The three-judge court upheld the residency requirement. This Court noted probable jurisdiction. During the appeal Sosna obtained a divorce in New York, though custody and support issues remained unresolved from the Iowa proceeding. She returned to Iowa to prosecute the appeal. Sosna sought class certification under Fed. R. Civ. P. 23 to represent Iowa residents who had lived in the state less than one year and wished to initiate divorce actions but were barred by the residency requirement. The parties stipulated that numerous people were similarly situated, joinder was impracticable, her claims were representative, and she would adequately protect class interests. The district court approved the stipulation in a pretrial order.
View caseA federal diversity dismissal based on a state statute of limitations is not automatically an adjudication on the merits for claim-preclusion purposes. The receiving state's preclusion law determines whether the time-bar dismissal bars a later timely action in that state.
A statute that revives a time-barred criminal prosecution by extending the limitations period after expiration violates the Ex Post Facto Clause. The extension retroactively alters the quantum of evidence sufficient to convict and reopens punishment for past conduct.
A firm that completely lacks any docketing system for tracking notice deadlines and allows a client's claim to become time-barred breaches its duty of reasonable care. The client's internal monitoring procedures do not relieve the firm of its professional obligation to calendar legal deadlines.
Laches is not a rigid time bar. Courts weigh unreasonable delay and resulting prejudice as one factor when deciding whether to grant an injunction, but the doctrine does not automatically defeat equitable relief.
…That situation is not presented in appellant's case, for the durational residency requirement enforced by Iowa does not at this time bar her from the Iowa courts. Unless we were to speculate that she may move from Iowa, only to return and later seek a divorce within one year from her return, the concerns that prompted this…