I don’t know why Crane, Poole & Schmidt decided not to sue Madison’s campus area bars, however, Lommen, Nelson, Cole & Stageberg like the idea enough to sue’m twice.
CONSPIRACY! A Minneapolis law firm filed a lawsuit Tuesday accusing 25 bars near the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus and their trade association of conspiring to inflate drink prices from 1990 until last year. The class action lawsuit seeks relief for revelers it claims were ripped off. A judge in April dismissed a similar lawsuit filed by the same firm, Lommen, Nelson, Cole & Stageberg, saying there was no conspiracy.The current UW Student body were somewhere between zero and four years old back in 1987 but allegedly the Madison Tavern League was already planning to extort money from them by charging prices in bars higher than a take-out 12 pack of Miller Lite. It has been a rough year for Madison Tavern Owners as every act of accommodation they have offered local government has brought them nothing but trouble. Marsh Shapiro of the Tavern League blames this latest assault on the encouragement of UW Law Professor.
The conspiracy allegedly started after Wisconsin increased its drinking age from 18 to 21 in 1987. Despite reduced demand, drink prices increased faster than inflation in the 1990s "and the timing and sequence of those increases were agreed upon" by bar owners during monthly meetings of the Madison Tavern League, the lawsuit claims.
Bars Blame UW Professor: Carstensen is an antitrust law professor. He says he is frequently approached by plaintiff's lawyers. "There is nothing wrong with connecting possible members of a class to a potential lawyer. It has nothing to do with fomenting the lawsuit," says Carstensen, "It was going to happen."Even though Professor Peter Carstensen has been indoctrinated at Yale, he may not be the most leftist person on Bascom Hill. In fact his recent US Senate testimony is a fairly reasonable explanation of the role of law and regulation in maintaining efficient markets.
Free and open markets are generally the best institutional structure for achieving all the important goals of economic policy: efficiency, dynamic growth, equitable allocation of resources, opportunity for all participants. Economists and policy makers have also long recognized that markets are not inherently fair, efficient or open. Where markets are unconcentrated, there are many buyers and sellers, and there is a strong tendency for efficient, workable and fair methods to develop as the inevitable outcome of the interaction of many participants all seeking a neutral and open market place.Still, if Marsh Shapiro is correct and a UW Professor in anyway encouraged students to pursue these lawsuits, it shows a remarkable ignorance or apathy about the real negative effects of harassment lawsuits, and predatory trial attorney’s upon small business people. Carstensen may believe, in theory, that the legal principles keeping Kraft and Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland from manipulative control of agricultural markets are scalable down to Mom and Pop shops on State Street, but to encourage frivolous lawsuits shows disrespect for both the law and those the law is supposed to protect.
