A Study On The Rules Of American Salvage Obligation

There is no doubt that we have a moral duty to render assistance to the strangers who are in peril. When it is concerning to whether we should impose a legal duty to implement this kind of moral duty in practice, however, the answer is different from one jurisdiction to another. Under the influence of the common law tradition and the needs arising from the modern society, the rules of Anglo-American on duty to rescue are appeared as a legal system in which no duty to rescue is its principle in general supplemented by the civil liability exemption doctrine, and made the limited affirmative duty to rescue as its exception. It significantly differs from the legal system of duty to rescue in civil law countries and People’s Republic of China. The reason is rooted in the unique tradition of common law, the special situation of politic and constitutional environment of the United States, and the evolution characteristic of common law system.This dissertation is including six parts:Introduction states the necessities to conduct a research on American rules of duty to rescue, introduces the currently existed research on this issue, and express the roadmap of the research in this dissertation.The first chapter reviews the American rules on duty to rescue through a historical path. The origin and developments of duty to rescue in the history are discussed and the rules currently executed in the United States on this issue are presented.The second chapter analyzes the current legal system of duty to rescue in America by resolving it in three principles with a detailed analysis for each on its contents, characteristics and problems faced.The third chapter gives the reasons for the status of American rules on duty to rescue in nowadays from a view of jurisprudence, and analyzes its rationality and inevitability.The fourth chapter is a comparison between American system, continental system and Chinese system of duty to rescue. The reason for the difference is also mentioned. At the end of this dissertation, the characteristics of American rules on duty to rescue and the experience of its legislation are summarized based on the discussions above. Some suggestions for the Chinese legislation on duty to rescue are given as a conclusion for the research.