A genuinely rare judicial self-correction
Here's a real and fascinating piece of South Dakota legal history. The state's tolling statute, SDCL § 15-2-22, addresses situations where the general statute of limitations gets extended. An earlier South Dakota Supreme Court decision, Shippen, had interpreted this statute as creating a strict five-year maximum limitations period whenever tolling applied — a cap that became the accepted understanding of the law for years afterward.
The correction
In a later case, Jensen, the South Dakota Supreme Court revisited this exact question and found that the prior "five-year maximum" interpretation effectively eliminated the word "extended" from the statute altogether — and simply wasn't supported by the statute's actual language. The court noted that South Dakota law elsewhere uses a wide range of limitations periods, from six years to twenty years, undermining the idea that a strict five-year ceiling was ever the legislature's intent for this particular tolling provision.
Why this genuinely matters for anyone relying on tolling
This history is a real illustration of how even settled-seeming interpretations of a tolling statute can turn out to be wrong, and can get corrected by a later court. Someone calculating a deadline based on an older case or an outdated summary of South Dakota tolling law could end up relying on an interpretation the state's own Supreme Court has since rejected.
The more ordinary tolling rules, for context
Beyond this specific history, South Dakota's statute of limitations generally doesn't run during a period when the defendant is absent from the state in the way described by the tolling statute, and South Dakota law recognizes specific categories of legal disability that can likewise pause the clock for a person who qualifies.
Why confirming the current rule genuinely matters
Given that South Dakota's own courts have had to correct a prior misreading of this exact tolling statute, confirming exactly how it applies to a specific set of facts today — rather than relying on an older source that might still reflect the superseded interpretation — is a genuinely important step.