416
Opinion of the Court
applied to bar an otherwise legitimate defense to a timely lawsuit, for limitation statutes "are aimed at lawsuits, not at the consideration of particular issues in lawsuits," ibid.
The Beaches come up short, however, on the question whether this is a case for the general rule at all. The issue here is not whether limitation statutes affect recoupment rights, but whether § 1635(f) is a statute of limitation, that is, "whether [it] operates, with the lapse of time, to extinguish the right which is the foundation for the claim" or "merely to bar the remedy for its enforcement." Midstate Horticultural Co. v. Pennsylvania R. Co., 320 U. S. 356, 358- 359, and n. 4 (1943). The "ultimate question" is whether Congress intended that "the right shall be enforceable in any event after the prescribed time," id., at 360; accord, Burnett v. New York Central R. Co., 380 U. S. 424 (1965), and in this instance, the answer is apparent from the plain language of § 1635(f). See Good Samaritan Hospital v. Shalala, 508 U. S. 402, 409 (1993).
The terms of a typical statute of limitation provide that a cause of action may or must be brought within a certain period of time. So, in Reiter v. Cooper, supra, at 263-264, we concluded that 49 U. S. C. § 11706(c)(2), providing that a shipper " 'must begin a civil action to recover damages under [§ 11705(b)(3)] within two years after the claim accrues,' " was a statute of limitation raising no bar to a claim made in recoupment. See Note, Developments in the Law: Statutes of Limitations, 63 Harv. L. Rev. 1177, 1179 (1950) (most statutes of limitation provide either that "all actions . . . shall be brought within" or "no action . . . shall be brought more than" so many years after "the cause thereof accrued" (internal quotation marks omitted)); H. Wood, 1 Limitation of Actions § 1, pp. 2-3 (4th ed. 1916) ("[S]tatutes which provide that no action shall be brought, or right enforced, unless brought or enforced within a certain time, are . . . statutes of limitation").
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