Study On The School's Liability In Minor Students' Injury Accidents

This thesis is about the study on school's liability in minor students'injury accidents, and is divided into three chapters. The first chapter is about meaning,characters and types of the minor students'injury accidents. The minor students, which are full-time students, refer to those people who don't reach the age of 18 , and who study in primary schools,middle schools including special schools,vocational technology schools, colleges and kindergartens, regardless of government-run schools or privately-run schools. According to this thesis, the injury accidents refer to those concerning the damage of the rights of life and health. This thesis has also classified the students'injury accidents. According to the fact whether the school is at fault for causing the damage, the students'injury accidents may be classified as two types: one is the type of accidents of school's liability, the other is the type of accidents of school's no-liability, which may be sub-classified as the accidents of students'liability or minor students'guardians'liability, the contingent accidents and the accidents of the third party's liability. The accidents of the school's liability are those which are caused by the school at fault for causing the damage and in breach of the duty of educating,administering and protecting. The accidents of the school's no-liability are those which occur during the period of school's administration but the school is not at fault for causing the damage. It is meaningful to distinguish the accidents of the school's liability from those of the school's no-liability. Because it may not only help us to judge whether the school should bear the liability when a certain students'accident has occurred but also help us to guide our practice. A very important feature of the minor students'injury accidents is that one party in the legal relationship caused by the minor students'injury accidents is sure to be the minor students. The minor students are without or with limited capacity for civil conduct, therefore the school should burden a high duty of care. The second chapter of this thesis is about the legal relationship between minor students and the school. The legal relationship between the minor students and the school is that the school has the duty to educate, administer and protect the minor students, and most people are in agreement with this opinion. Nevertheless, many of them disagree with each other about the nature of this relationship. As a result, there are several different theories of it. In my view, the nature of the legal relationship between them is not so much a single legal relationship as compound one. That is to say, the legal relationship between them is both administrative and civil. No matter what the nature of the legal relationship is, it is sure that once the school fails to exercise its duty of care and causes damage to the minor students, the school should bear civil liability. The teacher's act of duty is one of important items in this part.As an organization, the school exercises its duty only through every teacher, and here the problems arise. Since not teacher's every act certainly belongs to his school, how can we distinguish a teacher's individual act from the school's act? There is a varietyof different theories of it, but it is generally accepted that what decides whether a teacher's act belongs to the school's act is the relationship between the teacher'act and his (or her) duty. If there is a relationship between them, the teacher's act belongs to the school's act, so the school bears the liability of damage which is caused by the teacher to the injured minor students. If not, the teacher's act belongs to himself but not to the school, and the school does not bear the civil liability for the teacher's acts. When we judge whether the teacher's acts are acts of duty or not, we should consider fully the fact that in schools, especially in primary schools, teachers usually use their powers to order their students to do some work for themselves or schools. Without or with limited capacity for civil conduct, most students are ready to do what are told by their teachers. In order to protect minor students and motivate the school to administer the teachers, I think it is reasonable to regard it as acts of the school that the teachers order their students to do things in the working time, or do things not in wording time but relevant to their duty in schools. The third chapter of this thesis is about the imputation principles of tort liability about minor students'injury accidents. According to our laws, only when a school through its fault causes student's injury accidents, does the school bear civil liability. As to how to judge whether a school bear liability or not, I think we should consider such three factors as damage, causation and damage, fault. In practice, whether a person has fault is the same as whether he has breached his duty of care. Because the minor students are without or with limited capacity for civil conduct, the school burdens a high level of duty of care to the minor students.When we judge whether a person has breached the duty of care, we may take the objective standard. The precautions we should take to guard against injury to others depend on the circumstances of the case. The more likely injury is to result, and the greater the severity of that injury if it does result, the more we should do to eliminate the risk. On the other hand, if the costs of eliminating the risk exceed the benefits to be gained from doing so, then if might be reasonable to do nothing. This has been expressed as a mathematical formula by American judge, Learned Hand J. Where the probability of injury occurring is P, the extent of the likely loss is L and the burden of taking precautions to eliminate the risk is B, liability will arise if B