Theory Of Several People Environmental Tort

This paper mainly researches on the legal applicability of several people environmental tort liability. The particularity of the environment infringement, makes the complexity of the several people tort liability in the field of environmental pollution more outstanding. In the field of several environmental tort liability, the coverage of mutual negligence, the judgmental criterion on individual behavior whether it is wrongful enough to cause the whole damage, the validity scope of causation presumption, the legislative purpose of determining the responsibility of the polluters based on the pollutant, emission and other factors, and the legal applicability when causality is unknown, all of which are intertwined, result in the chaos of legal interpretation and legal applicability in the judicial practice. In the light of the distinction of patterns of liability and its essence, combining with the particularity of environmental pollution liability, this paper studies the deficiency of the ideas that classify the several people environmental tort under the current framework of law and provides advises on how to improve it. Besides preface and epilogue, this paper is divided into four parts:The first part studies the formation mechanism and the scope of application in the joint liability and proportional liability of several people tort. The third part refers to the types of environmental tort liability and the opinions of legal effects. The fourth part analyzes “the same legislative reason”, on the basis of which the legislation fills the legal loophole through the analogy method. Both of these are based on the theory of the first part. In addition, the distinction on and the application of the patterns of liability are controversial in theory. Under these considerations, this paper settles the first part to elaborate the basic theories. By comparison, as a breakthrough of himself responsibility principle, the legitimacy of joint liability lies in the idea that the behavior can be evaluated as a whole in the law. The media which combine several behavior as a whole in the law are the indication of acting together and possible causal relationship. On the surface, the purpose of integration relieves the difficulties on proving causal relationship. In essence, the difference of the joint and proportional liability is the allocation of the risk when some people lose their liquidity. In other words, the distribution of the risk and its legitimacy should be considered when regard it as an integral evaluation in the law.The second part studies how the characteristics of environmental tort affect the recognition of environmental tort liability. Causality presumption is only applied to presume the existence of causal relationship in the environmental pollution behavior and injury consequence, rather than presume the environmental pollution behavior itself can cause the damage. When considering whether the pollution behavior itself is enough to cause damage, it is lack of operable criterion in judicial practice. Environmental infringement is extensive, latent, continuous, indirect, and compound. Moreover, the science and technology on judging the environmental infringement is limited. All of these lead to the complexity and difficulty in proving causal relationship of the several people environmental tort liability. In the field of several people environmental tort liability, it is common that the unclear causation makes legal applicability difficult.The third part reflects on the idea that classify several people environmental tort in current legislation and legal interpretation by analyzing the difficulty and confusion of the legal applicability in the field of several people environmental tort liability. The complexity and difficulty in proving causal relationships in the several people environmental tort liability, result in the absence of logic premise in applying typical rules to many disputes. Typical rules cannot deal with the cases that causality is unclear in the field of several people environmental tort liability.The fourth part puts forward the opinion that apply the rule of mutual dangerous action to the several people environmental tort when causality is unclear, from the perspective of legal interpretation. It is concluded that whether the tortfeasor or their share is unknown, according to the greatest scope of damages which is caused by the tortfeasor, the tortfeasor shall bear the possible maximum responsibility within the scope of the possible causal relationship respectively. In other words, the person who is responsible for the tort shall also replace the person who has no liquidity to pay the damages, mainly the unknown damages. In the meantime, people would not bear the responsibility that beyond his behavior.