Certain types of actions' limitations have statutory provisions so as to be explicitly extensible by judicial discretion, such as those on personal injury, defamation, or death.
Other specific conditions apply generally to limitations, such as fraud, concealment, or mistake on the part of the defendant, or legal incapacitation (such as being in a coma), or infancy of the plaintiff/claimant.
Other (common-law) doctrines, still, apply to the interpretation and application of limitations, such as the non-counting of a day on which the cause accrues, or that of it not being seen as equitable for the limitation to be deemed to expire if the natural end of it would fall on a weekend or other day for which the courts are closed, such that it would not be possible for the claimant to bring the claim, although I think some of these may have also become explicitly subsumed under statutes.
However, what would be the position in case, through no fault of the claimant's own, and yet also no fault of the defendant's, the claimant were to be prevented, either by an act of god or by that of a third party, from bringing their claim. Are there any doctrines that could save such a claim, where the limitation principle could be disapplied (such as perhaps on an equitable basis, for example)?
