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Section V   Certain Short Prescriptions

Revised Laws of Saint Lucia (2021)

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Section V   Certain Short Prescriptions

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    2121.   The following actions are prescribed by 6 years:

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      1.     For professional services and disbursements of advocates and attorneys, reckoning from the date of the final judgment in each case;

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      2.     For professional services and disbursements of notaries, and fees of officers of justice, reckoning from the time when they became payable;

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      3.     Against notaries, advocates, attorneys, and other officers or functionaries who are depositaries in virtue of their office, for the recovery of papers and titles confided to them; reckoning from the termination of the proceedings in which such papers and titles were made use of, or, in other cases, from the date of their reception;

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      4.     Upon inland or foreign bills of exchange, promissory notes, or notes for the delivery of merchandise, whether negotiable or not, or upon any claim of a commercial nature, reckoning from maturity; bank notes, however, being excepted from this prescription ;

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      5.     Upon sales of movable effects between non-traders, or between traders and non-traders, these latter sales being in all cases held to be commercial matters ;

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      6.     For hire of labour, or for the price of manual, professional, or intellectual work and materials furnished, saving the exceptions contained in the following articles;

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      7.     For visits, services, operations and medicines of physicians or surgeons, reckoning from each service or thing furnished.

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    2122.   The following actions are prescribed by 3 years;

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      1.     For seduction, or lying-in expenses;

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      2.     For damages resulting from delicts or quasi-delicts, whenever other provisions do not apply;

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      3.     For wages or salaries of employees not reputed domestics and who are engaged or hired for a year or longer period;

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      4.     For sums due to schoolmasters and teachers, for tuition, and board and lodging furnished by them.

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           (Amended by Act 34 of 1956)

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    2123.   The following actions are prescribed by one year:

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      1.     For slander or libel, reckoning from the day that it came to the knowledge of the party aggrieved;

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      2.     For wages of domestic servants, merchants' clerks and other employees who are hired by the day, week or month, or for less than a year;

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      3.     For hotel or boarding-house charges.

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           (Amended by Act 34 of 1956)

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    2124.   Actions against public officers in respect of acts done by them in good faith and in respect of their public duties are prescribed by 6 months.

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    2125.   Short limitations and prescriptions established by ordinance, follow the rules peculiar to them, as well in matters respecting the rights of the Crown as in those respecting the rights of all others.

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    2126.   After renunciation or interruption, except as to prescription by 10 years in favour of subsequent purchasers, prescription recommences to run for the same time as before, if there be no novation ; this rule, however, being subject to the provisions of the following article.

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    2127.   Any action which is not declared to be perempted, and any judicial condemnation, constitutes a title which is only prescribed by 30 years, although the subject matter thereof be sooner prescriptible.

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    A judicial admission interrupts prescription, even in an action the peremption of which is declared or which is otherwise insufficient to interrupt it alone; but the prescription which recommences is not thereby prolonged.

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    2128.   A continuation of like services, work, sales or supplies, does not hinder a prescription, if there have been no acknowledgment or other cause of interruption.

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    2129.   In all the cases mentioned in articles 2111, 2121, 2122, 2123 and 2124, the debt is absolutely extinguished and no action can be maintained after the delay for prescription has expired except in the case of promissory notes and bills of exchange, where prescription is precluded by a writing signed by the person liable upon them.

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    2130.   Actual possession of a corporeal movable, by a person as proprietor, creates a presumption of lawful title. Any party claiming such movable must prove, besides his or her own right, the defects in the possession or in the title of the possessor who claims prescription, or who, under the provisions of the present article, is exempt from doing so.

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    Prescription of corporeal movables takes place after the lapse of three years, reckoning from the loss of possession, in favour of possessors in good faith, even when the loss of possession has been occasioned by theft.

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    But a possessor in such case is secure against revendication, even in the absence of this prescription if the thing have been bought in good faith in a fair or market, or at a public sale, or from a trader dealing in similar articles, or have been acquired in any commercial dealing.

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    A possessor in good faith of the lost or stolen property even when this prescription has not been accomplished, and when possession has not been acquired under any of the conditions specified in the last preceding paragraph, can be compelled to restore it in an action of revendication only upon being reimbursed the price which he or she has paid.

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    If the lost or stolen property have been sold under the authority of law, it cannot be revendicated at all.

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    The thief or other violent or clandestine possessor of a thing, and his successors by general title, are debarred from prescribing by articles 2061 and 2062.

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    2131.   Prescriptions which the law fixes at less than, 30 years, other than those in favour of subsequent purchasers of immovables with title and in good faith, and that in case of rescission of contracts mentioned in article 2119, run against minors, idiots and persons of unsound mind, whether or not they have tutors or curators, saving their recourse against the latter.

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