 |
 |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|
|
|
|
Barragan v. Casco Design Corp.9/22/2005
ing contribution has made such payment towards discharge of his or her liability." 735 ILCS 5/13-204 (West 1992). Prior to 1995, there was some confusion as to which statute of limitations would be applied to a contribution action where there was no payment discharging liability, but where an underlying action had been filed. The question in such cases was whether the two-year statute of limitations for contribution applied or whether the statute of limitations for the underlying, predicate claim, which might be longer or shorter than two years, applied. Courts had held that where an underlying direct action is pending, an action for contribution is subject to the same statutes of limitation and repose that are applicable to the original claimant's cause of action in the underlying direct action. See Caballero v. Rockford Punch Press & Manufacturing Co., 244 Ill. App. 3d 333, 337 (1993) (and cases cited therein).
The 1995 amendment added subsections (b) and (c), which inserted the language providing that " n instances where an underlying action has been filed by a claimant, no action for contribution or indemnity may be commenced more than 2 years after" service of process in the underlying suit and "shall preempt * all other statutes of limitation and repose." 735 ILCS 5/13-204(b), (c) (West 1994); Pub. Act 88-538, ยง5, eff. January 1, 1995. Thus the obvious purpose of the 1995 amendment of section 13-204 was to clarify which of two arguably relevant statutes of limitations should be applied to contribution claims: the two-year limitations for contribution, or the limitations for the predicate claim, which might be longer or shorter than two years. See, e.g., Medrano v. Production Engineering Co., 332 Ill. App. 3d 562, 574 (2002). The 1995 amendment addressed this question by providing a mandatory two-year limitation period as stated in section 13-204, regardless of the underlying limitation period. Thus, the statute provides that all other limitation periods are preempted. However, nothing in section 13-204 addresses the saving clause of section 13-207.
Moreover, the legislative debate over the amendment is bereft of any indication that the General Assembly wanted to prevent the saving provision from preserving responsive counterclaims for contribution that would otherwise be time-barred, or that it intended to amend section 13-204 to bring about that effect. Indeed, it would have been unreasonable for the legislature to have expected courts to interpret the preemption clause of section 13-204 as including section 13-207 within its ambit, given that Illinois courts had been interpreting section 13-207 as saving provision, and not a statute of limitations, for over a decade at the time of the 1995 amendment. See, e.g., Pape, 145 Ill. 2d at 30 ("the courts below erred in construing section 13-207 as not saving Pape's counterclaim despite her failure to comply with the limitations period of section 302(a)(1) of the Marriage Act"); Ogg, 121 Ill. App. 3d at 34 ("The saving clause opens the door and exposes the initiating party to otherwise stale claims"); Benckendorf, 112 Ill. App. 3d at 663 (section 13-207 " `saves' otherwise barred claims"); Ogg, 121 Ill. App. 3d at 34 (refers to section 13-207 as "the saving clause").
Casco relies upon a couple of rules of statutory construction to support its position. Specifically, it notes that when two statutes are in conflict, the more specific should take precedence over the more general and the more recently enacted statute should be applied over the earlier enacted statute. But neither of these principles is of any import here because the two statutes are compatible and can be read harmoniously. See Ferguson, 202 Ill. 2d at 311-12 (a court h
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Illinois Personal Injury Attorneys
Personal Injury Lawyers
|
| |
to fill out a simple form to connect to Personal Injury Lawyers in your area.
|
|