A Study On American Citizens' Litigation And Its Reference To China

Along with rapid social development, China has caught up with Japan in2011and GDP has leaped to the second in the world. China has created a lot of development miracle. However, development brought a lot of serious environmental problems. The severe haze phenomenon in many parts of China which appeared at the end of2012sounded the alarm to us once again. We must pay more attention to environmental protection. How to promote environmental protection through improving the legal system is the important subject of the legal community. The environmental citizen suits of America founded in the1970s is an innovation. We should learn from its successes and failures.The article consists of three parts. The first part shows a basic overview of the environmental citizen suits of America. This part introduces the legislative background and theoretical basis of environmental citizen suits of America and further explains the concept and characteristics of environmental citizen suits of America. The second part analyses the content and operation of environmental citizen suits of America and points out its problems. The last part points out obstacles of building environmental citizen suits in our country, then demonstrates the feasibility of overcoming obstacles and finally draws specific design of environmental citizen suits. Hope it can provide some useful reference for the establishment of the citizen suit in China.