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PI Brief Update

Editorial: Getting to the Heart of Limitation - Aidan Ellis, Temple Garden Chambers

20/03/12. In Ministry for Defence v AB [2012] UKSC 9, the Supreme Court had to grapple with the meaning of the provisions relating to the claimant’s ‘date of knowledge’ in section 14 of the Limitation Act 1980. A remarkable feature of AB is that different speeches in the Supreme Court plumped for three different dates as the relevant date of knowledge. Regardless of the result reached, the level of disagreement can only highlight the difficulty of applying section 14.

There is an alternative. Wouldn’t a more elegant solution, as suggested by Lady Hale, simply be to get rid of section 14 altogether? The idea would be to leave the basic scheme of the Limitation Act intact: there would be...

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All information on this site was believed to be correct by the relevant authors at the time of writing. All content is for information purposes only and is not intended as legal advice. No liability is accepted by either the publisher or the author(s) for any errors or omissions (whether negligent or not) that it may contain. 

The opinions expressed in the articles are the authors' own, not those of Law Brief Publishing Ltd, and are not necessarily commensurate with general legal or medico-legal expert consensus of opinion and/or literature. Any medical content is not exhaustive but at a level for the non-medical reader to understand. 

Professional advice should always be obtained before applying any information to particular circumstances.

Excerpts from judgments and statutes are Crown copyright. Any Crown Copyright material is reproduced with the permission of the Controller of OPSI and the Queen’s Printer for Scotland under the Open Government Licence.