Value-Based Foundations of Temporality in Private Law

In recent years, there have been truly revolutionary changes in legislative and regulatory enforcement practices with respect to the time factor in private law, both in terms of the statute of limitations and adverse possession. The legal positions of the Russian Constitutional Court and the Russian Supreme Court, on the one hand, have paved the way for the broader application of the institution of adverse possession. On the other hand, they have made it possible to virtually eliminate barriers in terms of the expiration of the statute of limitations for claims that aim to recover state and municipal property from its illegal owners and persons who have unfairly enriched themselves at the expense of the state or a municipality. Since the dogmatics of private law is the language used to describe and understand legal phenomena, naturally such major changes need to be reflected in the civil procedure doctrine. At the same time, there must also be a discussion about the value-based foundations of the new approaches and the civil procedure wording uses to describe them, thereby moving from the ‘jurisprudence of concepts’ to the ‘jurisprudence of values’. Here it would be highly appropriate to discuss the substantive aspect of the principles of good faith, reasonableness, and fairness in the context of how they are applied with respect to the institution of limitations, e.g., in terms of rejection with reference to one of these principles, to satisfy claims that have been exempted from the statute of limitations by virtue of a direct reference to the law due to the authorized person’s unfair delay in filing them. In private law, it is the same with the expanded scope of application of legal custom, for which the limitation of a provision of customary law is one of the fundamental factors that constitutes it as such.