Law on limitation in Europe - between probation and reformation limitation and reform in Switzerland

The statute of limitation has always dealt with the fading power of time. This may have contributed towards the fact that this pivotal legal concept has not received much attention. Recently however, legal scholars and legislators have focused more on the law of prescription. This is apparent in the new German and French statutes of limitation as well as the efforts to reform prescription in Swiss Tort Law. In Switzerland prescription in private law is regulated in the general section of the Swiss Code of Obligations. This section is currently being examined by a group of Swiss and European legal scholars who are researching for the project "Swiss Code of Obligations and European Contract Law" ("Schweizerisches Obligationenrecht und Europäisches Vertragsrecht"). Within this project the current Art.1-183 OR (Swiss Code of Obligations) are being compared to the developments in European contract law and where necessary improved and/or amended. In this context, this article presents the pivotal elements of a statute of limitation in private law and the weaknesses of the current regulation in the Swiss Code of Obligations. With this in mind, a possible normative concept for a modern statute of limitation is outlined while taking the core issues of the ongoing efforts for reform into account.