Studying On The Imputation Principle Of Environmental Tort Liability In The Perspective Of Law And Economics

The concept of justice is so unclear that the angle of view of fair and justice couldn’t analysis of the imputation principles of tort law and its causes. And standard of fair and justice as only criteria of right laws often lead to the breakdown of the whole social welfare. In this case, the purpose of the law should be prompted the social welfare maximization (social total cost minimized), and as objective to make laws.The purpose of environmental tort law is to minimize the total cost of the society. On this target, different imputation principle have different incentives. Negligent liability can stimulate the polluters and the infringed to take effective preventive measures, and strict liability encourages polluters to adopt effective prevention motivation alone. Different error of court trial closely related to different imputation principle. When compensation may not be able to fully compensate, fault liability is affected by the court of error smaller, while in the case of polluters cautious standard to determine the error, strict liability has the advantages. The judicial cost is different under different imputation principle. Strict liability will lead to more lawsuits, and overall judicial cost is very high; Negligent liability will not lead to the number of lawsuits under the strict liability, but individual case investigation cost is very high.The strict liability of the fault defense of our country can incentive polluters to take the best prevention level, and can stimulate the infringed to take reasonable behavior level. But, the strict liability of the fault defense and the system of burden of proof leads to excess environmental infringement lawsuit, which causes the shortage of judicial resources.