DeKalb County Pension Fund v. Transocean Ltd.

JOSÉ A. CABRANES, Circuit Judge:

A statute of limitations “creates a time limit for suing in a civil case, based on the date when the claim accrued.”1 By-contrast, a statute of repose “puts an outer limit on the right to bring a civil aetion[,] ... measured not from the date on which the claim accrues but instead from the date of the last culpable act or omission of the defendant” — “in essence an absolute bar on a defendant’s temporal liability.”2

This appeal concerns the latter, “relatively rare” species of limitations period.3 Specifically, the principal questions presented are the…