Taking inequality as a key challenge of our time, this article 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 article 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.

中文翻译：

---

当穷人支付更多费用时的合同法

本文将不平等视为我们这个时代的一个关键挑战，旨在强调消费市场及其支撑的法律基本规则是造成财富分配不公平的重要因素。它说明了合同条款中所体现的产品设计如何使企业能够逃避竞争并沿着社会财富分配曲线向上转移资源。然后，它强调了某些定价做法（例如“或有费用”）的有争议的合法性，以及它们对合同法基本原则构成的挑战。对 2015 年 Beavis v ParkingEye 案的深入研究认为，英国最高法院以一种不受传统合同推理支持且不受当代市场失灵分析证明合理的方式验证了条件定价模型。该文章要求合同法正视现实，即它以具有经济和政治意义的方式塑造市场分配，并呼吁对合同法裁决对不平等的贡献进行更严格的审查。