The Research On Gefalligkeiten

Gefalligkeiten is also called friendship behavior. It is a kind of action that one party provides property or service to the other party for free out of good motives and friendliness. It can reveal one's good character of willingness to help. Since it can strengthen the friendly relationship between people and accelerate the harmonious development of the society, it is advocated and encouraged by social norms such as morality, ethics and religion.However, the situation of disputes happened during the process of Gefalligkeiten is not rare. Especially under the condition that the party of giving help causes the party of receiving help to suffer damage, on one hand, the act of giving help is out of good willingness and this party can not benefit from the act. If the law requires the party of giving help to undertake all the responsibilities, it would be too harsh and unfair, and on the other hand, although the other party receives the help, it does not mean that he/she agrees to abdicate the right to claim damage. So it becomes very important to balance the two sides, which means to fully protect the favored party's personal and property right and take the good motives of the party of giving help into consideration as well.The law and regulations of our country has not made clear regulations on the relevant issues of Gefalligkeiten and there is a controversy over the definition of Gefalligkeiten in the academic world. These block the way of further analysis of the responsibility undertaking issue of damage caused by Gefalligkeiten. This paper will summarize the concept and characteristics of Gefalligkeiten and analyze its nature and judgement standard. Based on this, the paper will make further research on the treatment of disputes caused by Gefalligkeiten, state the mitigation of tort liability from different angles and finally come to a definite conclusion. By using foreign theories and cases as reference and consulting the existed domestic research results, this paper adopts many research methods such as comprehensive comparison, economic analysis and interest measurement.This paper has four parts. The first part is Overview on Gefalligkeiten. It gives a brief introduction on the concept, characteristics, types and judgement standard of Gefalligkeiten by referring to the records in domestic and foreign documentations. The second part is Characteristics of Gefalligkeiten. This part stresses on the analysis of various points of view in the academic world on the determination of Gefalligkeiten's characteristics and defines the characteristics of Gefalligkeiten by compraring Gefalligkeiten and other similar acts. The third part, Judgement Standard of Gefalligkeiten, mainly states the subjective and objective standards on judging Gefalligkeiten to lay the foundation for further analysis of the liability issue. The fourth part is Treatment of Disputes Caused by Gefalligkeiten. It claasifies the types of Gefalligkeiten disputes and focuses on the disputes on damage caused by Gefalligkeiten. After multi-angle comprehensive analysis, the author takes the view that in Gefalligkeiten, the tort liability of the party that gives help should be mitigated appropriately.