Temporal dimensions of rights and legal relations

1. Why time matters to legal concepts

Every right has a beginning (the investitive fact, Salmond’s title), a duration and an end (the divestitive fact). Bentham and Salmond analysed these as “dispositive facts”; Radin criticised Hohfeld for ignoring them. Time enters law in four ways:

1. as the measure of a right’s duration (a lease for 99 years, a patent for 20 years);
2. as a condition of a right’s existence (vested or contingent);
3. as a cause of acquisition or extinction (prescription, limitation, adverse possession, laches);
4. as the reference point for which law applies (retrospectivity, intertemporal law, transitional provisions).

2. Vested, contingent and accrued rights

• Vested: the right is complete in a present holder even if enjoyment is postponed. Under section 19 of the Transfer of Property Act, 1882, a vested interest is not defeated by the death of the transferee before he obtains possession.
• Contingent (section 21): the right depends on a specified uncertain event and becomes vested only on its happening.
• Spes successionis: the mere chance of an heir-apparent to succeed is not a right at all and cannot be transferred (section 6(a), Transfer of Property Act).
• Accrued rights on repeal. Section 6 of the General Clauses Act, 1897 provides that unless a different intention appears, a repeal does not affect any right, privilege, obligation or liability acquired, accrued or incurred under the repealed law, or pending proceedings. This is why cases begun under the IPC and CrPC continued under them after 1 July 2024; the BNSS itself contains a saving clause.

In Garikapati Veeraya v. N. Subbiah Choudhury, 1957 INSC 10, a Constitution Bench held that the right of appeal is a vested right that accrues to a litigant when the suit is instituted, and is governed by the law then in force unless a later statute takes it away expressly or by necessary implication.

3. Retrospective and prospective law

• Presumption against retrospectivity for substantive law: statutes are presumed not to impair existing rights or create new obligations for past transactions.
• Procedural law is generally retrospective, because no one has a vested right in a forum or a mode of procedure, unless the change affects substantive rights. The Court summarised these principles in Hitendra Vishnu Thakur v. State of Maharashtra, 1994 INSC 237 (TADA amendments).
• Criminal law: Article 20(1) forbids conviction under an ex post facto law and a penalty greater than that in force when the offence was committed. Compare Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 15 of the ICCPR. Fuller made non-retroactivity one of his principles of legality (see Legal Theory).
• Judicial decisions: the declaratory theory treats a judgment as stating what the law always was, hence retrospective. Prospective overruling, adopted in I.C. Golak Nath v. State of Punjab, 1967 INSC 45, allows the Court to limit a new rule to the future, protecting rights that vested under the old understanding.

4. Lapse of time ending or creating rights

• Limitation ordinarily bars the remedy, not the right: a time-barred debt may still be paid and may be acknowledged afresh (section 18 of the Limitation Act, 1963) or revived by a written promise to pay (section 25(3) of the Indian Contract Act, 1872). It becomes an imperfect right.
• Extinctive limitation: section 27 of the Limitation Act extinguishes the right to property itself at the end of the period for a suit for possession. Combined with Articles 64 and 65, this is how adverse possession transfers title (see the possession notes).
• Acquisitive prescription: easements are acquired by 20 years’ uninterrupted, peaceable enjoyment as of right (section 15 of the Indian Easements Act, 1882; section 25 of the Limitation Act); 30 years against the Government.
• Laches and delay in equity and in writ jurisdiction: courts may refuse relief to a party who sleeps over his rights, though there is no fixed period.
• Roman law: usucapio gave ownership by possession for a set time; praescriptio longi temporis was a defence. Continental codes keep this distinction between acquisitive and extinctive prescription.

5. Duration as a feature of property

• Ownership is unlimited in duration (Austin; Honoré’s “absence of term”), while leases, life interests and licences are limited.
• Rule against perpetuities (section 14 of the Transfer of Property Act): an interest may not vest later than a life in being plus the minority of an unborn person. The law limits how far present owners can control the future.
• Intellectual property is deliberately temporary: patents 20 years (Patents Act, 1970), copyright generally the author’s life plus 60 years in India (Copyright Act, 1957), registered designs 10 years extendable by 5 (Designs Act, 2000), while trade marks and geographical indications last indefinitely if renewed every 10 years. Time is how IP law balances incentive and access (see the note on incorporeal property).

6. Intertemporal law

In international law, a juridical fact must be appreciated in the light of the law contemporary with it. Max Huber stated this in the Island of Palmas arbitration (1928), adding that the continued existence of a right must also follow the conditions required by the evolution of law. Article 28 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) states the presumption that a treaty does not bind a party in relation to acts or facts before its entry into force. The same reasoning governs succession to pre-Constitution laws under Article 13(1): they become void only from 26 January 1950, and only to the extent of inconsistency (the doctrine of eclipse).

7. Future generations

Rights are usually held by living persons, but law increasingly protects those not yet born. The principle of intergenerational equity and sustainable development was accepted as part of Indian environmental law in Vellore Citizens Welfare Forum v. Union of India, 1996 INSC 952, along with the precautionary and polluter-pays principles. The public trust doctrine treats the State as trustee of natural resources for present and future users. Comparative examples: the Philippine Supreme Court allowed children to sue on behalf of future generations in Oposa v. Factoran (1993); the German Federal Constitutional Court in the climate case (Neubauer, 2021) held that the climate law unfairly shifted the burden of emission reduction onto the future freedoms of the young. This is the most interesting modern extension of the temporal dimension, and it connects with the rights of the unborn (see the note on legal personality).

How this is examined

As a short note (3 marks internal; 8 marks in the university paper): define the dimension in two lines, then vested and contingent rights, accrued rights on repeal, retrospectivity, limitation and prescription, and intertemporal law, each with one authority. A longer answer can end with intergenerational equity.