The Study Of How To Prove The Causation Of Toxic Tort In The United States

American toxic tort litigations have increased dramatically since the nineteen seventies, which is striking in American tort law. The decision of medical causation makes the traditional tort problem, namely, causation even more subtle and sophisticated. In order to prove the factual causation of toxic tort, the U.S. courts developed the substantive elements rules, market share attribution theory and other special rules; based on the reliance on scientific evidences to prove the causation of toxic substances, established the review standard on scientific evidences such as expert testimony and so on; and took the scientific methods such as epidemic statistics to prove the causation.We don't have toxic tort as a specific type of litigations in China, which appear as cases of environmental tort, professional diseases and food safety, and when its crossing with environmental tort, the presumption of causation has been used in order to reduce the burden of suffer. However, the scientific evidences to prove causation are obtained by judicial expertise system. In the judicial practice, there are problems such as the excessive reliance on the conclusions of the scientific evidences, the lack of identification standard on scientific evidences, and the few solutions and the chaos in identification methods in the use of scientific methods. The application of the scientific evidences and the scientific methods in U.S. is successful reference to China.This article consists of five parts.Part one starts with the hazard situation and relief issues of toxic substances in our country, to propose that we can study the relevant rules and methods to prove the causation in American. Part two is on the analysis of the causation of toxic tort in United States. First the author introduces the background of toxic tort litigation in U.S., and expounds the relevant concepts of causation focusing on the analysis of factual causation, and then elaborates the substantive elements rules, market share attribution theory in order to prove the causation in fact of toxic tort.Part three is the use of scientific evidences and scientific methods in toxic tort litigation in U.S., including the review standard of evidences and the process of using epidemic statistical methods to prove general causation and specific causation.Part four points out the problems of proving causation in toxic tort in China from the aspects of the burden of proof, scientific evidences and scientific methods combining with the analysis of the judicial expertise system in China.Part five is the inspiration to our country. First the author conceives to build identification standard on scientific evidences and reduce the excessive reliance on the conclusion of judicial evaluation. Second the author advises to develop the relevant methods to apply epidemic statistics and define the judgment standard of causation.