University of California Hastings College of the Law
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The Case Against Surge Pricing
No full textSurge pricing—using data and algorithms to raise prices in response to unexpected increases in demand—has spread across the economy in recent years, from Amazon and Disney World to commuter highways and, of course, Uber, which is infamous for surge pricing rides. Companies claim that surge pricing equilibrates supply and demand, but that is impossible, at least in the short run when demand unexpectedly outstrips supply. What surge pricing really does is to ration existing supply based on ability to pay. That is both distributively unjust and potentially inefficient. It should also be considered a violation of the antitrust laws because it magnifies the harm to consumers of the shortage and concomitant harm to competition associated with a surge in demand relative to supply. As such, surge pricing is similar to price fixing, which, when used by firms that have already been tacitly colluding, magnifies the harm to consumers associated with the demise of competition in the market in which the firms are colluding. Courts should therefore rule surge pricing per se illegal under the antitrust laws, just as they do price fixing today
Spotlight Research Brief: Exclusionary School Discipline and Student Health and Wellbeing
No full texthttps://repository.uclawsf.edu/crej/1005/thumbnail.jp
There Would Be Food Forever: Leveraging the Culvert Case to Fight Toxic Fish Contamination in the Columbia River
No full textThe Native American Tribes of the Pacific Northwest signed treaties in the 1800s with a representative of the federal government that purported to protect their right to fish in their usual and accustomed places. Despite this explicit pro-vision of their treaties, the Tribes have struggled to exercise this right to fish. Through a series of court cases spanning decades, culminating in The Culvert Case in 2017, the Stevens Treaty Tribes have secured their right to access their tradi-tional fishing grounds, their right to an equal share of the harvestable fish, and finally, their right to the continued existence of the fish. However, a recent report uncovered a worrying new threat to the Tribes’ source of sustenance: chemical contamination due to unchecked pollution of the Columbia River. The fish that make up a sizable portion of the Tribes’ diet are contaminated with levels of mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls that render the fish unsafe to eat in the amounts typical of the Tribes. In the face of this cancer-causing contamination, this Note examines how the Stevens Treaty Tribes could sue the federal government and the individual states through which the Columbia River runs to enforce their treaty rights and ensure action is taken to address the contamination and keep the fish safe for human consumption