Punitive Compensation System Of Tort Law

Since the foundation of New China, our civil law has developed circuitously under the guidance of the legislative activities and the principles of civil law in the former Soviet. After the initiation of the reform and opening-up, we began to learn from continental law system much more to promote the development of our civil legislation, and our civil compensation system also strictly follows the compensatory principle, which emphasizes that the amount of compensation should be equivalent with the actual losses. We has been introducing the punitive compensation system into some special laws since the promulgation of the Law of the PRC on the Protection of the Rights and Interests of Consumers in 1993, and the newly--enacted Tort Law also provided tentatively for the punitive compensation system. However, compared with the countries of Anglo-American law system which has the well-developed punitive compensation system, our legal system is deficient and beset the following problems such as not keeping paces with the progress of social development, not well confronted with the reality of the existence of a variety of problems of serious infringements on the personal rights and property rights, etc.. Up to now, our system of punitive damages in tort law needs to be perfected not only on the scope of application, the amount of compensation; it also needs to be stipulated in the Basic Civil Law as soon as possible in order to suit to the new conditions and problems confronted by the developments of Socialist market economy. In the context of this reality, it is vitally important to strengthen the research on the system of punitive damages.The article adopted methods of analysis and comparison to study the punitive compensation system, and then put forward certain suggestions to our national punitive compensation system by drawing on the foreign advanced experiences and the former achievements.The thesis consists of five sections except the preface and epilogue, about thirty thousand words.The first part is an overview of punitive damages. The characteristics of punitive damages are introduced by defining the concept of punitive damages. Then I combed the stipulations,evolvements and judicial practice of the punitive damages in the ancient law and modern law. The second part is focused on the nature and functions of punitive damages. Controversies of the nature of punitive damages have been combed in this section and my own point of view is made after this combing work. When discussing the functions of punitive damages, I divided them into two classifications:direct factions and indirect functions.The third part expounds the relationship between the system of punitive damages and the other related systems. This section compared the system of punitive damages with the surrounding related systems, mainly with the compensatory damages, mental damages, criminal fines and administrative penalties, and then the nature of punitive damages is revealed by comparison, which is paving the way for the following discussion.The fourth part studies comparative law on the scope of the system of punitive damages. Stones from other hills may serve to polish the jade of this one----I summarized the scope of application,the amount of compensation and the tends of this through the inspection to the developments of the punitive damage systems in common law and civil law countries and regions in order to provide an excellent background for the discussion about the deficiencies of the system of punitive damages in our country.The fifth part is mainly about the existing system of punitive damages in our tort law and how to perfect it. On the basis of the former four sections, the thesis studies the current system of punitive damages in our civil law, then points out that the scope of application of this system is too narrow, the nature of meeting the need of emergency in legislation is too obvious thus the lack of theoretical guidance is aroused, and additionally the provisions of the amount of compensation are not very reasonable in the areas of judicial practice. Finally, it is proposed that we should adopt the module of the combination of uniform legislation and respective legislation in the progressive legislation progress. According to the specific conditions in our country, we should expand the scope of application of the punitive damage system, and regulate the method of calculation of the amount of compensation.