Summary

The concept of public interest is used relatively often in legal argumentation, but few lawyers have attempted to describe the actual substance of this concept particularly thoroughly. Even amongst renowned legal scholars there seems to a slight reluctance to examine the nature of public interest, since, due to its high level of abstraction and dependence on relevance in context, it is not possible to exhaustively define the concept of public interest. One must be resigned to the fact that this is a case of an undeterminable legal concept. It is still possible, however, to debate as to when public interest is even necessary or useful as an argument, and what is definitely not public interest. Such a discussion is necessary particularly because the use of public interest is mainly used as a legal argument in the limitation of the subjective rights of an individual.

The aim of the article is to demonstrate the use of the concept of public interest as a legal argument in law, to briefly introduce the relevant arguments of various authors on this topic and to derive the meaning of public interest through the context in which it is used. The various terms that are used to denote the concept of public interest are also analysed.