Settling disputes out of court

The twenty-third entry is la sospensione della prescrizione, and the noun in the middle is the one to watch. An English reader sees « prescription » and thinks of a doctor, and that sense really is there in Italian as well: la prescrizione medica is the written instruction on a medicine. But in a legal text la prescrizione is time itself, the period after which a right can no longer be enforced or an offence no longer tried. Il reato è caduto in prescrizione means the offence is time-barred, and nothing whatever has been prescribed. English uses a different word here altogether. The rule is « limitation », the clock is the limitation period, and a claim brought too late is « statute-barred », so the entry above is the suspension of the limitation period: time stops running while the mediation is on foot and starts again afterwards. « Prescription » does survive in English law, but only for the opposite movement, a right gained by long use, as in a prescriptive right of way. One language loses a right by it, the other wins one.