The Legal Concept of “Source of Increased Danger”

The work explores the concept of “source of increased danger”, the approaches to determining which, in the doctrine of civil law, are far from unambiguous. The article summarizes the existing approaches to the definition of the concept of “source of increased danger”. The reasons for the need to develop a definition of the concept under study and fix it at the legislative level are indicated. One of these reasons is the rapid complication of technologies, the introduction of innovations in all spheres of society. Despite the centuries-old discussion of civilist scientists, there is still no established, more or less unambiguous position on this issue. Due to the fact that there are no clear, specific explanations in the acts of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, we believe that changes in the law are long overdue due to the ambiguity of individual terms (namely, the guilt of the victim, the owner of a source of increased danger, activities that pose an increased danger to others) used in Article 1079 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. The need to consolidate the concept of “source of increased danger” is thought by us as the most important goal of unifying terminology in all branches of Russian legislation. We proceed from subjective – objective conditioning of processes and phenomena, illustrating their interconnectedness due to forced close interaction. The Authors argue the need to adopt a separate federal law establishing the specifics of compensation for harm by activities that pose an increased danger to others. The development of new technologies, the activities of third parties, the behavior of the victim, the quality and characteristics of the causer of harm, conditions and conditions are the prerequisites for the situation itself as a source of increased danger. The generalization of judicial practice on the example of analyzing a specific case is an indicative example of the culprit of the incident avoiding responsibility and injustice of individual court decisions based on judicial discretion. Determining ways to improve the provisions of Article 1079 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation, in our opinion, will ensure uniformity of judicial interpretation and, as a result, optimization of law enforcement in the field under consideration. However, our work outlines the common features of research for a number of new scientific problems that require further research work.

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