Analysis Public Interest In Theory Of Law

The “public interest” plays a very important role in the field of law study. It hasbecame a basic value criteria to mediate various interests in the structural reforms andlegal construction. However there are no indications of a clear concept and an applicablescope of the "public interest" at either level of the constitution or the administrative law,and this makes real public interests and false public interests in reality can be bothachieved to the need of the "public interest". A lot of work has been done for this in theacademic circles, and the research literature of public interests are endless. But, it comesto very different conclusions due to different attentions. The academia has not given aunited definition of the public interest, which makes the lack of theoretical support inlegislation. Since the legal concept is regarded as one of the basic elements to constitute alaw, whether its connotation and extension is certain or not will directly determine that ifthe practice of the legal norms related to this concept could reflect the will of legislators,as a result to form a kind of clear social expectations, and really helps to regulate citizens’behavior and control social conflicts.At present, academic analysis of the public interest is mainly reflected in twoaspects: one is using concept analysis and content lists of the public interest, tosummarize the public interest criteria in the legal provisions; the other is trying to discussthe attribution of the main public interest, and to solve practical problems of the abuse ofpublic interest through the legitimate procedure. Nevertheless, both of these researchideas have not showed the particularity of the public interest in our country. The diversityof interests, which is showed on the public interest of its own, makes any study methodhas theoretical shortcomings. The science of law should be studied by looking into theform of law, including the source of the legal norms’ efficiency, logical structure, conceptanalysis and so on, and also do research on the relationship among law, society, economy,politics, ideology, morality, culture, history and other factors.Actually the public interest is not a vague concept, but because it is dynamic andrepresents different meanings to different groups and regions, so many people think thatthe concept of public interest is impossible to be defined and very difficult to grasp. Tocomprehend the public interest requires focusing on two levels as follows: First, it isuncertain in the abstract, and changes with the development of the age. But it must be theshared interests of all the people within a country, and distinguished into directbeneficiaries and indirect beneficiaries, and also the current beneficiaries and long-termbeneficiaries. However, no matter what kind of distinction is carried, the main beneficiaries must represent the integrity. Second, it takes the operation of the concretepractice as an object of study to understand the public interest. As regards different publicinterests, because the range of the main beneficiaries varies, it naturally shows differentparticularities, so it should be replaced by concepts similar to the public interest, such asnational interests instead of the public interests that the national defense constructionneeds and social interests instead of the economic development in a certain region. Sucha kind of distinction is advantageous to recognize the definition subject and theimplementation subject of different interests. And then the regulation with procedure inaddition is taken, which would effectively limit the behavior of the local government’sprivate and personal gains as the name of "public interest".In this paper it analyzes the public interest through the methods of semanticanalysis, comparative studies and historical research in the writing process, the mainideas are: It discusses the difference between the notions of public interests in our countryand in the West, and the concept of public interests in our country must reflect our uniquecircumstances, which is not only to give exhaustive matters belonging to public intereston the definition of legislation, but also to distinguish between the national publicinterests and the social public interests in the judicial interpretation. For different publicinterests, it needs to set up different procedures to ensure the effective realization of thepublic interest according to the particularity of the main subjects of definition andimplementation. By this we can restrict the strong status of local governments to definepublic interest so as to truly keep the maintenance of our public interest, and further toresolve the current social conflicts of interests.