Harvey Weinstein? Roy Moore? What About the Crimes of Bill Clinton and Robert Byrd?
Dov Fischer
November 14, 2017, 12:05 am
If statutes of limitation no longer apply, well, then, be our guest. Who needs “the Byrd Rule”?
Harvey Weinstein really started something. Or his cowardly “brave” accusers did.
In this new time warp, are there not aspects of bewilderment juxtaposed amid all these unwanted-sex accusations dating back 30 and 40 years?
In settled law, we have a concept called “statutes of limitation.” Limitations statutes painfully and regretfully recognize that, with the passage of enough time, memories fade and evidence innocently disappears. Moreover, at some point, even the worst of people deserve some sort of repose. Thus, a victim of a tort — a social wrong like a slip-and-fall — may have only two years to sue. If the victim sues even one day late, there is no mercy; the case is dismissed. When a written contract is breached in many states such as California, the victim has four years to seek legal recourse. Sue one day after the statute has run, and no recourse. If the breached contract was not integrated but merely oral, the clock for bringing a legal action runs out at only two years — because there is no documentation to augment other evidence. A case of defamation — only one year. In fact, under a curiosity of the law called the “single-publication rule,” a person defamed in a book that is published in a limited edition — like only eight copies ever produced, placed respectively in eight separate university libraries in hard-to-find archival stacks, such that no one even knows the manuscript is there — also has only one year to sue, even though she does not even know for years and years about the hidden limited volume that basely defames her. The statute runs from when the book is published, not from when the defamation victim or others learn of it.
more
https://spectator.org/harvey-weinstein-roy-moore-what-about-the-crimes-of-bill-clinton-and-robert-byrd/
