In August 2018, a Pennsylvania grand jury identified 301 priests and more than 1,000 victims across six dioceses. The state’s attorney general then explained that his office could charge only two of those priests, because the statutes of limitations had expired in nearly every case. The clock had run out during decades in which, according to the grand jury, church officials covered up the abuse.

That example involved criminal charges, and civil lawsuits follow the same logic: a fixed deadline expires whether or not the victim was able to act. Statutes of limitations allocate the risk of delay, and they normally place that risk on the person who waited. When an institution’s silence produced the delay, the institution should carry the risk of that delay.

Maryland, Quebec, and Ontario have removed the deadline for survivors, while the highest court of Maine has held that a legislature cannot revive claims that already expired. Courts, legislatures, and survivors are now testing how far that principle reaches, and the answers differ sharply from one jurisdiction to the next.

What Statutes of Limitations Protect

Lawmakers and judges defend time limits for three reasons. Evidence deteriorates: witnesses die, memories blur, and records disappear. Defendants deserve security, because people and organizations need to plan their affairs without old claims hanging over them. Claimants should act with diligence, since a system that rewards waiting invites strategic delay. Each reason is serious, and together they explain why legal systems commonly set deadlines for ordinary civil claims.

Moral philosophy contains a parallel intuition. In a 1992 article in Ethics, Jeremy Waldron argued that some historic injustices can be superseded: later events change the circumstances, so that what justice demands today differs from what it demanded when the wrong occurred. Limitation periods apply a similar thought to everyday disputes, presuming that arrangements settled over time deserve protection from reopened claims.

That defense rests on two assumptions: the claimant could have sued earlier, and the defendant did nothing to cause the wait. Where both hold, statutes of limitations divide risk fairly between parties who stood on equal footing. Child sexual abuse inside institutions undermines both assumptions. The evidence comes from research on survivors and from the records of the institutions themselves.

Why Survivors Miss the Deadline

Australia’s Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse drew on 4,817 private sessions held before July 2016 to measure how long survivors waited before telling anyone. The average was 23.9 years: 20.6 years for women and 25.6 years for men. The Commission also found that a perpetrator’s power and position inside an institution can inhibit disclosure at the time of the abuse and for years afterward.

Fear plays a measurable part. Among survivors who spoke about barriers and had disclosed as adults, about one in five, 20.3 percent, said fear of retribution, including from the perpetrator, had kept them silent as children. Silence of that kind has a cause outside the survivor, and the cause sits inside the institution where the abuse happened.

Peer-reviewed research agrees. A review of 33 studies published between 2000 and 2016, led by Ramona Alaggia of the University of Toronto, found that barriers to disclosure continue to outweigh the factors that help people speak, and that many survivors disclose for the first time in adulthood.

When an institution’s silence produced the delay, the institution should carry the risk of that delay.

Miranda Fricker’s Epistemic Injustice supplies a concept for part of the explanation. Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice leads a hearer to give a speaker’s word less credibility than it deserves. A child who accuses a respected priest, teacher, or coach confronts a credibility gap of this kind, and silence follows. Frameworks for protecting children’s rights start from that dependence of children on the adults around them.

Statutes of limitations treat the survivor’s silence as neglect of a claim. The research describes an injury that disables the person from making the claim at all. That difference decides who should bear the cost when the time runs out, and it sets up the central question about institutions that knew.

Concealment Turns Delay Into a Reward

Institutions often helped produce the delay. The Maryland attorney general’s 2023 report on the Archdiocese of Baltimore listed 156 members of the clergy as abusers of more than 600 children, after a four-year investigation into the abuse and into its cover-up by archdiocesan leaders. The attorney general called the result a systemic failure of the archdiocese to protect children.

The report concluded, from the archdiocese’s own documents, that church leaders cared more about avoiding scandal than about protecting children. An institution that receives a warning about a priest, reassigns him, and keeps the file closed helps set the timetable on which its victims can sue.

Each justification for statutes of limitations weakens in that setting. The evidence rationale loses force because the institution’s own files hold much of the proof. The security rationale loses force because a defendant cannot claim reliance on a deadline that its own conduct helped exhaust. The diligence rationale loses force because the claimant was silenced, and a silenced person cannot fairly be called negligent.

Fraud law already follows this logic in many jurisdictions: the clock often starts when the victim discovers the deception, since the deceiver should not profit from success at hiding the wrong. Statutes of limitations applied to hidden abuse do the opposite. They reward concealment, because the longer the institution succeeds in hiding what it knows, the stronger its legal protection becomes.

Maryland Reopens the Courthouse, Then Prices It

Maryland moved fast once evidence of cover-up became public. The attorney general released the 463-page report on April 5, 2023. Within hours the General Assembly passed the Child Victims Act, which removed the deadline for civil suits over child sexual abuse, and the governor signed it the following week.

An archdiocese, a private school, and a county school board sued to block the law, arguing that the legislature could not revive claims that had already expired. In February 2025 the Supreme Court of Maryland upheld the Act by a vote of four to three.

The majority found that the earlier time limit, enacted in 2017, was an ordinary statute of limitations, which creates no vested right to be free of liability, and not a statute of repose, which extinguishes the claim itself and does create such a right. Because the 2017 provision belonged to the first category, the legislature could repeal it and let old claims proceed.

Then the costs arrived. By March 2025 the attorney general counted about 4,000 claimants seeking damages from the state alone, with potential liability of at least $3.5 billion. The Archdiocese of Baltimore filed for bankruptcy protection after the law changed. In April 2025 the legislature cut the damages caps, from $1.5 million to $700,000 for private defendants and from $890,000 to $400,000 for public ones, for claims filed after May 31.

The sequence shows the policy problem in miniature. Reopening the courthouse is easy to defend when a report documents cover-up. Paying for what follows is harder, because an award large enough to bankrupt a diocese leaves less for the next claimant.

Maine and the Vested Rights Objection

Maine reached the opposite result on a similar law. In January 2025 its Supreme Judicial Court held, five to two, in Dupuis v. Roman Catholic Bishop of Portland, that once a limitation period expires, the defendant’s right to be free of the claim vests, and the legislature cannot revive the claim. A vested right is an entitlement that state constitutions can shield from retroactive legislation.

The ruling shows how much turns on state constitutions. In Chase Securities Corp. v. Donaldson (1945), the U.S. Supreme Court held that a state may lift an expired limitation bar without violating federal due process. The Maine court called federal precedent an unhelpful guide to its own constitution. Colorado, Kentucky, and Utah have also barred revival, while Vermont has allowed it.

The Strongest Objection and Its Limits

The objection behind these rulings deserves a direct answer. Legal certainty has value, and statutes of limitations exist to supply it: a person or organization that arranged its affairs around an expired claim can say the state changed the rules after the game ended. Retroactive liability also falls on today’s leaders, donors, and, in public institutions, taxpayers, many of whom had no part in the original wrong.

That reasoning carries weight for an innocent defendant and little for one whose predecessors concealed the abuse. Justice Douglas, joined by Justice Lawrence in dissent, called the deadline “an arbitrary constraint on bringing suit” and denied that its expiry creates a vested right. Maryland’s majority reached a similar destination by reading its earlier statute as a limitations period, a classification that left the legislature free to repeal it.

The two decisions leave survivors with unequal access to justice. A claim that proceeds in Maryland fails in Maine, because the outcome depends on how a court classifies an earlier deadline and how its state constitution treats vested rights. Neither court disputed the harm. They disagreed about who may carry the legal cost of the passage of time.

How Other Jurisdictions Handle Statutes of Limitations

Other jurisdictions have removed deadlines outright. After hearing thousands of survivors, Australia’s Royal Commission recommended in 2015 that limitation periods for civil litigation over child sexual abuse be removed, with the removal applying retrospectively. The Commission reasoned that existing limitation periods were inappropriate given how long many survivors take to disclose, which ties the legal reform directly to the research on disclosure.

In Canada, Quebec and Ontario went the same way. Quebec’s Bill 55, assented to in June 2020, made civil actions for sexual aggression, violence suffered in childhood, and spousal violence imprescriptible, meaning no deadline applies. It reaches past injuries, and it let some actions dismissed solely for prescription be filed again within three years.

Ontario’s Bill 132 removed the limitation period for every civil claim based on sexual assault in 2016. The change applies regardless of earlier expiry, with exceptions for claims already dismissed with no appeal left and claims settled by binding agreement. Those exceptions protect finality where a court or the parties have already decided the matter.

The Pennsylvania grand jury itself recommended a two-year civil window for older victims. In the United States more broadly, CHILD USA counts 29 revival windows across 23 jurisdictions as of January 2025 and reports 10,857 lawsuits filed under New York’s window, which closed in 2021.

The group calls these numbers manageable. Maryland’s experience shows that the financial question is real, and that unclear damages rules, such as a cap set per undefined “occurrence,” invite disputes that a clearer statute could have avoided at the outset.

A Rule That Can Survive Scrutiny

A defensible approach to statutes of limitations has four parts, and each answers a weakness exposed by the cases above. The first handles future claims, the second handles expired claims, the third protects defendants against lost evidence, and the fourth handles money. Together they keep courts open without handing a restored deadline to the institutions that caused the lapse.

• Abolish statutes of limitations for future civil claims based on child sexual abuse. Marci Hamilton’s Justice Denied makes the case that arbitrary time limits keep survivors out of court.
• Revive expired claims against institutions that knew of the abuse or concealed it. The legislature should record its findings about concealment. That standard answers the vested rights objection on its own terms, because a defendant cannot rely on a deadline that its own conduct helped exhaust.
• Let defendants prove specific prejudice from lost evidence. Dead witnesses and missing files can make a fair defense impossible in some cases, and a court should be able to dismiss those claims instead of presuming liability.
• Set damages rules before the claims arrive. Maryland’s mid-course reduction triggered a race to file before the cut took effect and left different caps for public and private defendants. A clear schedule, applied equally from the start, avoids both problems.

Who Should Carry the Risk of Delay

The same question about who bears the risk of delay arises wherever people depend on institutions that control the information about how they are treated, from schools to nursing homes. Courts have become arenas where institutional responsibility is contested, and for a survivor whose criminal case expired decades ago, a civil suit is often the only forum left.

Statutes of limitations remain a sound tool for ordinary disputes, where both sides stood on equal footing and the defendant had no hand in the delay. Applied to an institution that hid abuse, they convert successful concealment into legal immunity.

The Pennsylvania grand jury named 301 priests, and the law allowed prosecutors to charge two. Reopening the civil courthouse corrects that mismatch. The cost of doing so is a question for damages design, because reinstating statutes of limitations for these claims would hand the price of institutional silence back to the survivors who lived with it.