Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States this week will be the first papal visit since the Roman Catholic Church abuse scandal broke in 2002. Archbishop Pietro Sambi, the Vatican’s top diplomat in the United States, expresses confidence that the pope will address the scandal while here. Trial lawyers, however, having been asking legislatures for years to address the problem in their own particular way: more lawsuits. That proposed solution, through undoing statutes of limitations and permitting new lawsuits over long-ago crimes, creates more problems than it solves, and hurts more than just the actors responsible for those crimes.

Statutes of limitations, the rules that set a time limit on when a plaintiff may bring an action, play an important role in ensuring fairness in the justice system. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes noted, statutes of limitations are “designed to promote justice by preventing surprises through the revival of claims that have been allowed to slumber until evidence has been lost, memories have faded, and witnesses have disappeared.”

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A bright-line limit on bringing suit is important to legal certainty, and legal certainty is important to the economy. Businesses and third parties routinely rely on statutes of limitations to evaluate and manage risks and design their business models. The likelihood of lawsuits and liability stemming from any aspect of standard operations is weighed in decision-making. But laws that retroactively change the statute of limitations (called “reviver” statutes, because they revive dead claims) change the rules the mid-game and eliminate predictability. If dead lawsuits can, like zombies in horror movies, be brought back to life to inflict damage on defendants, the loss of legal certainty would be devastating to the ability of businesses to gauge risk.

Too, a large danger of permitting litigation over stale claims is the possibility that they will be fraudulent. Where corroborating or refuting evidence is not readily available, a plaintiff’s perjury may be all that is needed to recover in the mass tort context, where a defendant is often unable to use litigation mechanisms effectively to screen legitimate from illegitimate claims. The archetypical example is that of “bus jumping” — pedestrians leaping onto a bus after an accident, hoping to bring a claim against the municipality — but larger-scale frauds have happened in the asbestos and fen-phen contexts. And claims of long-ago wrongs are far easier to fake than those of recent events.