Klehr v. A. O. Smith Corp., 521 U.S. 179, 22 (1997)

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200

KLEHR v. A. O. SMITH CORP.

Opinion of Scalia, J.

tolling circumstance)." Johnson, supra, at 464. See also, e. g., Chardon v. Fumero Soto, 462 U. S. 650, 657, 662 (1983). "In virtually all statutes of limitations the chronological length of the limitation period is interrelated with provisions regarding tolling, revival, and questions of application. Courts thus should not unravel state limitations rules unless their full application would defeat the goals of the federal statute at issue." Hardin v. Straub, 490 U. S. 536, 539 (1989) (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). There is no conceivable reason why the same principle should not apply to the borrowing of an analogous federal, rather than state, limitations period.

Both the allurement and the vice of the "mix-and-match" approach to statutes-of-limitations borrowing (the possibility of which the Court today entertains) is that it provides broad scope for judicial lawmaking. We should have resisted that allurement today,3 as we resisted it in the past: "[W]e find no support in our cases for the practice of borrowing only a portion of an express statute of limitations. Indeed, such a practice comes close to the type of judicial policymaking that our borrowing doctrine was intended to avoid." Lampf, Pleva, Lipkind, Prupis & Petigrow v. Gilbertson, 501 U. S. 350, 362, n. 8 (1991) (emphasis added). It is, in other words, no wonder that the Court finds the question it has posed for itself today "subtle and difficult"; judicial policywonking is endlessly demanding, and constructing a statute of limitations is much more complicated than adopting one. Finding the most analogous cause of action whose

3 The Court disclaims any intent to adopt a "mix-and-match" approach, ante, at 193, but that seems to me inconsistent with its repeated references to the possibility of a discovery accrual rule—which is (and has been thought to be) the antithesis of the Clayton Act injury accrual rule. If the Court merely means to say that it is not sure how the Clayton Act accrual rule would apply in this case, then it should simply say so— thereby going a long way toward resolving the Circuit split and rendering this concurrence unnecessary.

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