Report No. 193
Procedural law or substantive law:
We shall now refer to another important but well-known principle which is crucial to the subject matter of this Report. In England and in India and in several common law countries, for a long time the law of limitation has been treated as procedural law and not as substantive law. A 'procedural law' is one which deals with the procedure in Courts which has to be followed by the parties to seek vindication of their rights. The rights which they seek to vindicate in the Court through the said procedure are the substantive rights. We shall be elaborating these aspects in the succeeding chapters. A procedural law whenever made, applies to all pending proceedings unless its application is restricted to apply prospectively.
On the other hand, a substantive law is always prospective in its application unless the legislature gives it retrospective effect. While it is a general principle of law that no statute shall be construed so as to have retrospective effect unless its language is such as plainly to require such a construction, that principle has not been applied to procedural statutes. The reason is that while substantive rights vested in persons cannot be interfered with by legislation except by clear language or by necessary implication, the position with regard to procedural law, is different. This is because nobody can have a vested right in any particular form, much less in an older form, of procedure.
It is in the above context that section 11 of the Limitation Act, 1963, makes special provision in respect of suits based in contracts entered into in Jammu and Kashmir or outside the territories of India and we shall refer to it in Chapter II and will be later making our proposals in Chapter IV for substituting new provisions in the light of contemporary developments which we will refer in Chapter III.
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