Keith Patten voices concerns over the uncertainty of limitation periods
“Certainty is the mother of quiet and repose, and uncertainty the cause of variance and contentions.” So said Sir Edwin Coke, the eminent jurist of the early 17th century. It is probably fair to say that he may not have been all that impressed by modern personal injury limitation law, where uncertainty seems to thrive. This is all the more peculiar when one considers that the promotion of certainty (through finality) is one of the traditional justifications advanced for the existence of limitation periods in the first place. This is one of the law’s epic conflicts—the desire to do justice between the individual parties bumping up against the desire to make outcomes reasonably predictable so that parties can sensibly organise their affairs in advance.
Asbestos exposure claim
It is in the context of those competing aims that we must view the Court of Appeal’s most recent pronouncement in this area in Sir Robert Lloyd v Bernard Hoey [2011] EWCA Civ 1060, [2011] All ER (D) 36 (Sep). The 70-year-old claimant sued five defendants
