Research On The Legal Relations Of The Courier Service Contract

In recent years, with the rapid development of the network economy, the scale ofcourier services enlarges rapidly, and courier disputes frequently occur. When courierservice disputes happened, compared to the courier service organizations, the clients’ rightsand interests, especially the recipients’ are more vulnerable to be infringed. China’s existinglegal norms in law are fragmented and chaotic, and departmental rules and industry policyhave low legal effect. So when disputes happen, it’s often very difficult for the clients of thecourier service to find a rights basis to protect their rights and interests, and they usuallycan’t get comprehensive protection.What the legal relations among the main parties of courier service contracts exactly be,how to assign the rights and obligations of them, how many rights the recipients could haveas a third party, and how to protect their legal rights, have become highly controversial andurgent to be solved.In this paper, proceeding from the reality, a research with four parts on the legalrelations of the courier service contract has be done by using semantic analysis, valueanalysis and comparative study. Basic connotations of the courier service contract have bedefined, such as the meaning, the classifications and the form. And classifications andreasons of its disputes have be cleared in the first part of this paper. After that, bycombining with the theories of the contract of a third party’s interests, the nature of thelegal relations of courier service contract is defined as the true contract of the third party’sinterests, and the necessity and possibility of it have be discussed lately.On this basis, with the attempt of constructing the tripartite legal relations of courierservice contract, the rights and obligations of the sender, the courier service organizationsand the recipients have been clarified. In order to better protect the recipients’ interests, therights to request performance and claim for damages have been given to the recipients. Atlast, after examining the relevant norms of the courier service contract in the United States,Germany and Japan, and combining with the problems of the current specification in China,suggestions about the development of special normative documents, the supervision of thecourier service organizations, the protection of the recipients’ interests have been proposed.