This introductory chapter explains the need for adopting an overarching perspective to the allocation of limited rights. Although the applicable legal frameworks may suggest otherwise, the awards of public contracts, authorisations, subsidies or government sales share common characteristics in the event that the number of rights available for grant is limited. These similarities are nowhere as manifest as with regard to the question of whether governments should use some form of competitive tendering when allocating these ‘limited rights’. Although the public interests involved in the allocation of these limited rights differ in substance and respective weight, competitive procedures should aim to optimise the pursuit of the different public interests involved. Using Mark Moore’s theory of creating and recognising public value, this chapter provides a general reflection upon the distinct role of the legal framework for allocating governments in solving this optimisation problem.

Chapter two considers the interwoven interests of individual participants, collectives interests and the wider public interests in research using linked data. The chapter discusses the research participants interests including dignity, autonomy and privacy and the traditional approaches to protecting them — consent and anonymisation — and concludes that these do not operate to effectively to protect individual interests in this context. Research using linked data can also have impacts, both beneficial and harmful on others, including socio-demographic groups, disease groups and the wider community and these should be explicitly recognised and evaluated by decision makers. The current legal and ethical regulation of data linkage research are critiqued for being too individualistic and alternative approaches are discussed.

Chapter two considers the interwoven interests of individual participants, collectives interests and the wider public interests in research using linked data. The chapter discusses the research participants interests including dignity, autonomy and privacy and the traditional approaches to protecting them — consent and anonymisation — and concludes that these do not operate to effectively to protect individual interests in this context. Research using linked data can also have impacts, both beneficial and harmful on others, including socio-demographic groups, disease groups and the wider community and these should be explicitly recognised and evaluated by decision makers. The current legal and ethical regulation of data linkage research are critiqued for being too individualistic and alternative approaches are discussed.

Privacy is a well-established element of the governance and narrative of modern society. In research, it is a mainstay of good and best practice; major research initiatives all speak of safeguarding participants’ rights and ensuring ‘privacy protecting’ processing of personal data. However, while privacy protection is pervasive in modern society and is at the conceptual heart of human rights, it remains nebulous in character. For researchers who engage with people in their studies, the need to respect privacy is obvious, yet how to do so is less so. This chapter offers first an explanation of why privacy is a difficult concept to express, how the law approaches the concept, and how it might be explored as a broader normative concept that can be operationalised by researchers. In that broad scheme, I show how individuals respond to the same privacy situation in different ways – that we have a range of privacy sensitivities. I think about four privacy elements in the law: human rights, privacy in legal theory, personal data protection and consent. Finally, I consider how law participates in the broader normative understanding of property as the private life lived in society.

Along with the increasing reference to public interest considerations in the preamble to many international investment agreements (IIAs), obligations geared at ensuring the respect and the protection of public interests have progressively gained more importance in treaty practice since the 1990s. Even though these obligations are not widespread, they constitute a noticeable evolution that results from the growing concern towards providing a greater protection to human rights largo sensu and sustainable development in international investment law and in public international law more generally. In this respect, it is noteworthy that the fulfilment of these objectives has traditionally been searched for in public international law through obligations placed upon States. This helps to explain why the relevant IIAs incorporate obligations placed primarily upon States and less frequently upon investors as a means of ensuring the protection and respect of the public interests attached to human rights and sustainable development. In line with this duality in terms of addressees, Chapter 8 analyses in turn the obligations placed upon States and those placed upon foreign investors. It emphasises the potential they have to contribute towards enhancing the enforcement of human rights in particular as well as the ‘horizontalisation’ of human rights law, meaning the trend at play in public international law towards placing human rights obligations upon non-state actors, and in particular upon multinational corporations.

As a result of the multilateralisation of FDI operations, of the criticism formulated against international investment law and arbitration and of the evolution of States’ policies, limitations placed on the protection of foreign investors have spread and diversified over time in international investment agreements (IIAs). Chapter 7 focuses on these limitations as contained in IIAs concluded in the 2010s, as these IIAs incorporate both traditional limitations and the new limitations that have recently appeared in treaty practice. It provides an analysis of treaty limitations by distinguishing between them on the basis of their scope of application, meaning mainly whether they apply to IIAs as a whole or to specific provisions thereof.