Cite as: 521 U. S. 179 (1997)
Opinion of Scalia, J.
knowledged in Malley-Duff that we "ha[d] no occasion to decide the appropriate time of accrual for a RICO claim," id., at 157, it takes no profound analysis to figure out what that decision must be. "Presumably the accrual standards developed by the lower federal courts in . . . civil antitrust litigation should be equally applicable to civil enforcement RICO actions." 1 C. Corman, Limitation of Actions § 6.5.5.1, pp. 447-448 (1991).
We have said that "[a]ny period of limitation . . . is understood fully only in the context of the various circumstances that suspend it from running against a particular cause of action." Johnson v. Railway Express Agency, Inc., 421 U. S. 454, 463 (1975). It is just as true, I think, that any period of limitation is utterly meaningless without specification of the event that starts it running. As a practical matter, a 4-year statute of limitations means nothing at all unless one knows when the four years start running. If they start, for example, on the 10th anniversary of the injury, the 4-year statute is more akin to a 14-year statute than to the Clayton Act. We would thus have been foolish, in Malley-Duff, to speak of "adopting" the Clayton Act statute, and of "patterning" the RICO limitations period after the Clayton Act, if all we meant was using the Clayton Act number of years.
We have recognized this principle in our more established practice (first departed from in DelCostello v. Teamsters, 462 U. S. 151 (1983)) of borrowing state rather than federal statutes of limitations. We have consistently followed "[s]tate law . . . in a variety of cases that raised questions concerning the overtones and details of application of the state limitation period to the federal cause of action. Auto Workers v. Hoosier Corp., 383 U. S. [696,] 706 [(1966)] (characterization of the cause of action); Cope v. Anderson, 331 U. S. [461,] 465-467 [(1947)] (place where cause of action arose); Barney v. Oelrichs, 138 U. S. 529 (1891) (absence from State as a
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