An Empirical Study On Judicial Application Of Compensation For Mental Damage In Environmental Torts

The tort caused by environmental pollution will not only cause the property loss of the victim,but also may bring serious personal damage,including mental damage.According to the current law,the people’s court shall support the mental damage caused by environmental tort.However,based on the particularity of environmental tort,it is questionable whether the general provisions of compensation for spiritual damage can be applied to environmental tort disputes without distinction,and whether spiritual damage combined with environmental tort has a unique way of definition.This paper is divided into four chapters,starting from the definition of spiritual damage compensation in environmental tort,starting from the perspective of judicial application,to explore the way to improve the spiritual damage compensation in environmental tort disputes in judicial practice.The first chapter mainly clarifies the definition and characteristics of the environmental tort and the spiritual damage compensation,deeply understands the particularity of the spiritual damage compensation in the environmental tort,and determines the applicable elements as the result of the damage,whether it reaches the severity,the causal relationship between the result of the damage and the severity.As for whether the infringer has the fault,it is also a controversial issue in the academic community,which will be discussed later.In the second chapter,for the purpose of judicial application,combined with the application elements of spiritual damage in environmental tort in the first chapter,we will make statistics,screening and analysis of the cases that meet the search conditions,so as to support the data and find out the judicial application of spiritual damage compensation in Environmental Tort.The third chapter classifies the judicial dilemmas with the idea of "Application of law-Determination of facts",and finds that the key to judge whether the compensation for mental damage of environmental tort is supported or not in judicial practice lies in the following aspects: the difficulty in judicial identification of the damage result,the different standards of whether the mental damage reaches the severity,the confusion of the burden of proof of causality,and the dispute of whether the infringer is at fault.The fourth chapter through the judicial status quo,starting from the problem,to the legislative dimension of the concept and judicial application of the proposed perspective ofjudicial difficulties to find a way out.On the one hand,in view of the above problems,we should expand our thinking in legislation;on the other hand,we should make clear how to reasonably use the discretion of judges and the judicial appraisal system in the judicial application in order to better guide the practice.