Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Washington University Law Quarterly

Abstract

All human interactions, and hence all legal rules, have a temporal dimension. Offer precedes acceptance; cause precedes effect; parents are born before their children. It is unremarkable for the entitlements of today to depend upon the events of yesterday. It would be inconceivable for them to depend upon the events of tomorrow. Time marches on, and in one direction, forward. When Kant said that time and space are fundamental categories for organizing all human experience, he spoke as much about the law as he did about physics, biology or history. This paper deals with time in two separate senses. In one sense, it is about how the categorical nature of time, as a necessary element of human experience and comprehension, shapes substantive and procedural legal rules. In a second sense, however, the larger part of this essay focuses on the contingent nature of time, that is, about the length of interval between cause and effect, between antecedent and consequence. These questions of degree raise issues where empirical guesses must fill in the gaps left by general theory. The passage of time between the operative facts on which liability rests and the onset or resolution of a lawsuit may be long or short; yet large bodies of law turn on the length of that interval, not simply on its direction. Time may cure some ills, but it exacerbates others. The legal treatment of temporal issues cuts across the traditional substantive categories of the law: property, contracts, torts and restitution. It also cuts across procedure and evidence. The purpose of this paper is to explore the legal response to the temporal dimension in the law of property.

First Page

667

Volume

64

Publication Date

1986

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