Legal Protection Of The Reputation Of Public Figures

Since the promulgation and implementation of The General Principles of the Civil Law of the People's Republic of China,the right to protection of reputation in China has been through nearly 30 years of development.In the first 15years,our country adopted the unified regulating model for protection of reputation,namely without distinguishing between ordinary people and the protection of the public figures separately,the resulting which has resulted in various tensions between the right of the society to be informed of and to supervise over the public power,the public interests,and social stuff,and the protection of reputation of public figures.With examining legislative and judicial practices outside China,we can see dichotomy pattern is applied by many countries.They protect reputation of public figures in a different way from they do it with ordinary people.And gradually they developed some special regulations on the matter,and correspondingly particular schemes and theories have been established.There has been a few specific cases dealing with public figures in like way since 2000 in China,which should be deemed a breakthrough and significant reform in legal system pertaining to protection of reputation of China.Because at the legislative level,at present don't employ the dichotomy mode to protect rights to reputation of public figures,including not explicitly providing for identity cognizance,scope limitation,liability attribution,criterion of compensation.It is necessary to look into judicial practices in order to summarize,analyze and explore matters like how the key issues should be viewed and the rules or regulations are applied.This thesis discusses,from a practical perspective and on the basis of cases analysis and empirical qualitative and quantitative analysis,the possible issues concerning the application of and the problems caused by differential protection of reputation under the existing law system.For the purpose there shall be some analyses on the legal system of the protection of right to reputation in China,some examination of the kind in other countries,some descriptions of the jurisprudence for regulating specially the right to reputation of public figures.As for the quantity and types of litigations,this study is also based on data collected by "Beidafabao" and "Beidafayi" in the past five years,which are mainly lawsuits concerning reputation of public figures adjudicated by People's Courts in China.The author also propounds suggestions on approaches of complementing relevant provisions,of employing judicial guidance under statute framework,of using actual malice modestly,and of prescribing in details the criteria for measuring mental damages caused by reputation infringement,and so on.