Contract law when the poor pay more

Spooner, Joseph (2024) Contract law when the poor pay more. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies. ISSN 0143-6503

Text (Contract law when the poor pay more) - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (826kB)

• Author

Abstract

Taking inequality as a key challenge of our time, this paper aims to highlight consumer markets, and their underpinning legal ground rules, as important contributors to inequitable wealth distributions. It illustrates how product design, as manifested in contractual terms, can allow firms to evade competition and divert resources upwards along society’s wealth distribution curve. It then highlights the contestable legality of certain pricing practices such as ‘contingent charges’, and the challenge they pose to fundamental principles of contract law. An in-depth view of the 2015 case of Beavis v ParkingEye argues that the UK Supreme Court has validated contingent pricing models in a manner unsupported by traditional contractual reasoning, and unjustified by contemporary market failure analysis. The paper asks contract law to confront the reality that it shapes market distributions in economically and politically significant ways, and appeals for greater scrutiny of the contribution of contract law adjudication to inequality.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2024 The Author(s)
Divisions:	Law
Subjects:	K Law
Date Deposited:	20 Feb 2024 10:36
Last Modified:	13 Mar 2024 10:54
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/122074

Actions (login required)

View Item