Study On The Judicial Application Of Significant Risk Of Damaging Social Public Interest

In 2015,the Supreme People’s Court clarified the legitimacy of environmental public interest civil litigation in Article 1 of the Supreme Court’s Interpretation on Certain Enforcement Issues in Environmental Public Interest Civil Litigation(hereinafter referred to as the "Judicial Interpretation on Environmental Public Interest Civil Litigation"),which states that there is a "substantial risk of harm to the social public interest"."The 2020 amended version still only maintains the principle of identifying its litigability.The ecological and environmental problems have been one of the typical risks in modern society,and the "significant risk of harm to the public interest" has been transformed into environmental harm step by step,so how to respond to the application of the "significant risk of harm to the public interest" has become an important rule of law issue.The total number of civil cases of public interest in the field of the environment is increasing.The general increase in the number of disputes in environmental public interest litigation demonstrates the need to prevent and control "a significant risk of harm to the public interest".The judicial application of the common legal standard "significant risk of damage to the public interest" is clearly a crucial link between the litigation policy in defense of the public interest in environmental protection and its preventive function.However,in judicial practice,the questions of what is "social public interest",how to determine "significant",whether it is "risk",and how to apply it in specific cases are becoming more and more important.The court’s decision has become a hindrance.In the light of the above,this paper takes the judicial application of the significant risk of harming social public interest as the object of study,and tries to summarize the problems in the judicial application of "significant risk of harming social public interest",analyze its causes and make theoretical clarification,and then make relevant suggestions on identifying its real meaning,improving its application,specific rules and relevant practice path through the theory of risk and legal hermeneutics.This article is divided into five main parts.The first part of the article elaborates on the background of the legal concept of "significant risk of harm to the public interest",the reasons for its application,the theory of risk not permitted by law and the path of legal hermeneutics,and identifies the shortcomings and possible breakthroughs in the current research by summarizing the theoretical foundations related to the subject of this article,so as to provide support for the analysis of the meaning of "significant risk of harm to the public interest" in the later part.This document provides support for the analysis of the meaning of "significant risk of harm to the public interest".In the second part of the article,through the selection and summary of sample cases,the content of representative typical cases is classified according to the problematic representation.In terms of facts,the courts do not have a clear understanding of the specific factual elements,and there is a lack of uniformity in the scale of justice;in terms of normative evaluation,the courts adopt different evaluation bases for each case,resulting in different evaluation standards;in terms of rules of proof and content,there are obvious differences between legislation and justice;in terms of liability implementation,the limited form of preventive liability is disconnected from the purpose of judicial decisions.The third part of the article analyzes the causes of the dilemma of the application of "significant risk of damage to social public interest".The main reasons are fivefold,including: the abstract nature of the ideology of "significant risk of harm to the public interest";the failure to identify the essential attributes of "significant risk of harm to the public interest" and to accurately extract the key factual elements;the lack of realistic evaluation criteria;and the effectiveness of the causation rule.The effectiveness of causation rules is not high,and the preventive liability is limited by the traditional tort law concept.The fourth part of the article follows the logic of identifying the meaning,determining the general idea,and then constructing specific rules to suggest optimizing the judicial application of "significant risk of harming social public interest" : clarifying the meaning of "significant risk of harming social public interest" at different levels;determining the general application idea from two dimensions of factual review and normative evaluation;constructing specific application rules from four perspectives of causative act,nature of violation,risk of falling into,and comprehensive evaluation criteria;clarifying more effective rules for proving causality;and improving the assumption of preventive responsibility in judicial link.