Duty Of Care In Tort

Duty of care is an important concept in tort law. Its origination is the case law in England in 19th century. With the advancement of technology, the development of large industrial machines and the baptism of the concept of natural law, negligence debuted in the UK as an independent tort. The concept of duty of care became the core and elements in negligence. Almost at the same time, European countries created some general provisions in the Civil Code, and adopted the fault principle in imputation of tort. Given the highly summarized legal provisions, judges in the cases created the concept of duty of care to make up for the lack of legislation. Although the two legal systems of tort law has a different legal traditions and legal systems, but all roads leads to Rome, they established the concept of duty of care in negligence. Since then, duty of care occupied an important position in the field of tort law. This paper takes the duty of care in negligence as the research object, and uses a comparative study and historical research methods to study its history and criteria. Considering the actual situation in our country, the paper puts focus on the introduction of duty of care in our country's tort law and would like to make useful recommendations judicial practice.This paper is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is an overview of duty of care. The first section introduces the common law and civil law in the origin and development of the duty of care, cited the represented cases in British and German tort law. And then summarizes the concept of duty of care and the change of its scope. SectionⅡsummarizes the criteria for determining duty of care. There are two kinds of criteria:the abstract criteria and the concrete criteria, but either the abstract or the concrete criteria has its advantages and disadvantages. The second chapter focuses on the duty of care in our country on the introduction in tort law. In section one,we introduce the obligation of safety guarantee.It is a specific type of duty of care. In section two, the author analyses the relationship between the duty of care and the fault principle. The paper reveals that the duty of care is an effective tool to determine fault and trying to make useful suggestions in the judicial practice.