浅析"谢绝自带酒水"的合法性问题

餐饮业中"谢绝自带酒水"的规定似乎从它诞生的那天起就备受争议。本文以经济学和法学为视角对该规定进行剖析,力图论证酒店谢绝消费者自带酒水之规定的合理性与合法性。     

对餐饮业“谢绝自带酒水”合法性的思考

就餐饮业"谢绝自带酒水"条款及其引发的争议而言,不能一概而论,需要就事实本身并结合相关法律进行具体分析:该种经营行为本身是由经济法来调整,存在是否合法的问题;而因"谢绝自带酒水"引发的经营者与消费者之间的纠纷则又是另一个问题,它由民法来调整,它涉及消费服务合同的效力问题。本文主要通过消费者和经营者双方的自主选择权和公平交易权及经济法中的正当竞争行为对餐饮业禁止自带酒水行为的合法性进行分析,力图论证酒店谢绝消费者自带酒水之规定的合理性与合法性,找到解决这一普遍存在的问题的平衡点,让经营者和消费者都能在法律的范围内享有自己最大的权利。     

四川“开瓶费”案：行规与法律的较量

2006年3月21日,成都市武侯区法院公开审理了四川省首例“开瓶费”案.消费者冯小红因“自带4瓶白酒就被强制加收了320元的开瓶费”,一怒之下将重庆孔亮火锅春江花月店告上法庭.四川省消协负责人对此明确表示,“谢绝自带酒水”或收取开瓶费是属于“消费歧视”的强制消费行为,违反了《消法》、《合同法》等法律法规.而火锅店却称店方是在维护自身的权益,因为四川省饭店与餐饮行业协会制定的《餐饮业行规行约》试行方案明确规定“餐饮企业原则上可以谢绝客人自带洒水进入餐厅享用,但企业应当将谢绝的告示设置于醒目的位置.如客人确要自带酒水需征得餐饮企业同意,企业可按物价部门的相关规定收取适量的服务费用……”由于四川餐饮协会制定的行规与法律规定发生冲突,这起案件引起了社会各界的广泛关注.……     

四川“开瓶费”案：行规与法律的较量

2006年3月21日。成都市武侯区法院公开审理了四川省首例“开瓶费”案。消费者冯小红因“仅仅只自带4瓶白酒就被强制加收了320元的开瓶费”。一怒之下，将重庆孔亮火锅春江花月店告上法庭。四川省消费者协会（以下简称消协）负责人对此明确表示，“谢绝自带酒水”或收取开瓶费是属于“消费歧视”的强制消费行为。是违反消费者权益保护法（以下简称（（消法》）、我国合同法（以下简称《合同法》）等法律法规的。而火锅店却称店方是在维护自身的权益，因为四川省饭店与餐饮行业协会制定的《餐饮业行规行约》试行方案明确规定：“餐饮企业原则上可以谢绝客人自带酒水进入餐厅享用。但企业应当将谢绝的告示设置于醒目的位置。如客人确要自带酒水需征得餐饮企业同意。企业可按物价部门的相关规定收取适量的服务费用……”由于四川餐饮协会制定的行规与法律规定发生冲突，这起案件自然引起了社会各界的广泛关注。     

四川首例"开瓶费"案:行规与法律的较量

2006年3月21日,成都市武侯区人民法院公开审理了四川省首例“开瓶费”案。消费者冯小红因“仅仅只自带4瓶白酒就被强制加收了320元开瓶费”,一怒之下将重庆孔亮火锅春江花月店告上法庭。四川省消协负责人对此明确表示“,谢绝自带酒水”或收取开瓶费是属于“消费歧视”的强制消费行为,是违反《消费者权益保护法》、《合同法》等法律法规的。而火锅店称店方是在维护自身的权益,因为四川省饭店与餐饮行业协会制定的《四川省餐饮业行规行约(试行)》有明确规定。由于四川省餐饮协会制定的行规与法律规定发生冲突,这起案件自然引起了社会各界的广…     

法规对自带酒水的“不作为”蕴涵立法理性

虽然目前网上不少人对于河南省人大常委会最终放弃对餐饮企业谢绝消费者自带酒水的规定进行干预的做法,纷纷表示难以理解与接受,但笔者认为,这种立法上的“消极不作为”,不仅体现了对餐饮市场与民间交易的尊重与保护,也体现了一种地方立法应有的谦抑、理性与明智。     

美国集体抵制行为反垄断法规制的经验及启示

美国的法院将集体抵制行为划分为横向集体抵制和纵向集体抵制,前者往往适用本身违法原则,而后者一般适用合理原则。这种思路对于我国行业协会集体抵制行为的反垄断法规制提供了重要启示。一方面,行业协会对其成员企业的商业性集体抵制应当适用合理原则;另一方面,对非成员企业的商业性集体抵制又应当作横向集体抵制和纵向集体抵制的区分,进而对其采取不同的原则。     

“酒水”之争的关键

元旦前夕,北京海淀区人民法院一审判决某酒楼收取“开瓶费”违法的法槌甫落,新年伊始,浙江温州23家酒店即联合谢绝“自带酒水”;消费者协会斥之为“霸王条款”,而烹饪协会则主张企业可自主定价……如此碰撞,近年来几乎每隔几个月就会集中“爆发”一次。就这样,关于自带酒水收取开瓶费的争论演变为一场扯不断、理还乱的拉锯战。酒店到底可不可以“谢绝”消费者自带酒水?刚刚制定的《安徽省餐饮业消费争议解决办法》草案规定,酒店可以不允许消费者自带酒水,但是必须明示;如允许消费者自带酒水但要收取开瓶费,必须事前告知顾客。省烹饪协会的人士说,为防止我省餐饮业无序竞争,《办法》中将有一些具体细则加以约束,肯定会对餐饮业有压力,也一定会有效果!我们愿经营者和消费者之间建立一种有情有义有利、同心同德同赢的和谐有序的关系。     

我们可以自带酒水吗——“酒水”之争的关键

元旦前夕，北京海淀区人民法院一审判决某酒楼收取“开瓶费”违法的法槌甫落，新年伊始，浙江温州23家酒店即联合谢绝“自带酒水”；消费者协会斥之为“霸王条款”，而烹饪协会则主张企业可自主定价……如此碰撞，近年来几乎每隔几个月就会集中“爆发”一次。就这样，关于自带酒水收取开瓶费的争论演变为一场扯不断、理还乱的拉锯战。 酒店到底可不可以“谢绝”消费者自带酒水？刚刚制定的《安徽省餐饮业消费争议解决办法》草案规定，酒店可以不允许消费者自带酒水，但是必须明示；如允许消费者自带酒水但要收取开瓶费，必须事前告知顾客。省烹饪协会的人士说，为防止我省餐饮业无序竞争，《办法》中将有一些具体细则加以约束，肯定会对餐饮业有压力，也一定会有效果!我们愿经营者和消费者之间建立一种有情有义有利、同心同德同赢的和谐有序的关系。     

消协参与制定规范岂可坐错板凳

备受各地消协和消费者诟病的“谢绝自带酒水”等餐饮业潜规则，可能在武汉“合法化”。昨日，武汉市餐饮业协会、消协、个私协推出《武汉市餐饮行业经营规范》，明确规定“餐饮企业有权接受或谢绝餐饮消费者自带酒水和食品进人餐厅享用”。（4月22日《长江日报》）     

The Boycott of the Law and the Law of the Boycott: Law, Labour, and Politics in British Columbia

This article uses a critical theoryllegal mobilization perspective to study the 1987–92 trade union boycott of the British Columbia labour law. The problems encountered establishing a total boycott–one that would eschew all contact with the state–and the subsequent modification of the parameters of the boycott through a selective reliance on the law offer an important case from which to learn more about the role of law and legal rights in highly regulated organizations and how collectives mobilize the law. The author argues that legal rights are important to unions because of their ability to mediate the complexity of labour relations through a decentralization of authority. At the same time, mobilization of the law for this purpose accentuates localized identities and unequal resources that operate in tension with a boycott ethos, necessitating a deliberative politics to legitimize the law. By exploring the tension between these two forms of mobilization around law–one to reduce complexity, another to legitimize broad collective norms–the author analyzes and draws some conclusions about the reproduction of social unionism in British Columbia.     

Social Movements and Social-Change Litigation: Synergy in the Montgomery Bus Protest

Two competing schools of thought have emerged to explain how the Montgomery bus protest of 1955–56 brought about changes on the city's Jim Crow buses. The dominant explanation attributes the changes to the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Montgomery Improvement Association. A second interpretation emphasizes the critical role of the Supreme Court's decision striking down the state and local bus segregation laws. This essay prooides a third explanation: that these two strategies–the boycott and the litigation–interacted, each shaping and reinforcing the other. Each strategy war a critical part of the struggle, but neither brought change by itself. This essay argues that the two strategies of the Montgomery protest created a synergy that was the key to bringing about changes on the buses.     

Boycott,Resistance and the Law: Cause Lawyering in Conflict and Authoritarianism

This article examines the role of cause lawyers in conflicted or authoritarian contexts where the chances of legal victory are often minimal. Drawing upon the literature on resistance, performance, memory studies, legal consciousness and the sociology of lawyers, the paper examines how cause lawyers challenge and subvert power. The paper first explores the tactics and strategies of cause lawyers who boycott legal proceedings and the relationship between such boycotts and broader political struggles, legitimacy and law. It then examines why and how cause lawyers engage in fairly hopeless legal struggles as acts of instrumental resistance (the ‘sand in the cogs’), transforming courts into sites of symbolic resistance, and using law as a form of memory work. The paper argues that boycott of and resistance through the courts can counter the use of law as an instrument of wickedness and a tool of denial and preserves a ‘stubborn optimism’ in the rule of law.     

Autism in the U.S.: social movement and legal change

The social movement surrounding autism in the U.S. has been rightly defined a ray of light in the history of social progress. The movement is inspired by a true understanding of neuro-diversity and is capable of bringing about desirable change in political discourse. At several points along the way, however, the legal reforms prompted by the autism movement have been grafted onto preexisting patterns of inequality in the allocation of welfare, education, and medical services. In a context most recently complicated by economic recession, autism-driven change bears the mark of political and legal fragmentation. Distributively, it yields ambivalent results that have not yet received systemic attention. This article aims to fill this analytical vacuum by offering, first, a synoptic view of the several legal transformations brought about or advocated for by the autism movement and, second, a framework for investigating their distributive consequences.     

Imperial paradigms: First Amendment theory,legal interdisciplinarity and reductionism

Increasingly, legal scholars are bringing the theories and vocabularies of other disciplines to bear upon legal issues, including First Amendment theory. While legal interdisciplinarity has many advantages, it also raises questions when scholars attempt to “reduce” legal theory to the conceptual frameworks of other disciplines. This article examines two such attempts, one by a feminist legal scholar, the other by an advocate of the economic analysis of law. The article critiques these approaches and explores some possible limits of interdisciplinary First Amendment scholarship.     

COMPETITION POLICY IN CHINA AND ITS RELEVANCE TO SMES

Competition policy has great relevance to all the firms in any economy. Even though it is unlikely that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have enough market power to constrain competition through a misuse of such power, they may still face prosecution if they are involved in a boycott of competitors or suppliers, price-fixing, output-restriction and other monopoly agreements. This article discusses antitrust issues pertaining to SMEs with a focus on China’s Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) and its implementation rules. Contrary to the popular view that SMEs benefit from competition laws, evidence shows that they are reluctant to get involved in antitrust litigation against large firms partly because of the high legal costs involved. There is an urgent need to promote an awareness of antitrust compliance in China and to educate SMEs about the need to avoid breaching the new antitrust law and its associated regulations. In the meantime, SMEs should take full advantage of the antitrust laws to fight against the abuse of market dominance directed at them, and to gain equal opportunities to market access.     

Getting Schooled: Legal Mobilization as an Educative Process

This article explores the role of formal education and specific legal knowledge in the process of legal mobilization. Using survey data and in‐depth case narratives of workplace disputes in China, we highlight three major findings. First, and uncontroversially, higher levels of formal education are associated with greater propensity to use legal institutions and to find them more effective. Second, informally acquired labor law knowledge can substitute for formal education in bringing people to the legal system and improving their legal experiences. The Chinese state's propagation of legal knowledge has had positive effects on citizens' legal mobilization. Finally, while education and legal knowledge are factors that push people toward the legal system, actual dispute experience leads people away from it, especially among disputants without effective legal representation. The article concludes that the Chinese state's encouragement of individualized legal mobilization produces contradictory outcomes—encouraging citizens to use formal legal institutions, imbuing them with new knowledge and rights awareness, but also breeding disdain for the law in practice.     

The Trouble with Boycotts: Can Fossil Fuel Divest Campaigns Be Prohibited?

Organizations like 350.org, Insure Our Future, and DivestInvest are leading campaigns to urge boycott and divestment from fossil fuels as a means to address climate change. Increasingly, they are finding success, from individual consumers to massive pension and sovereign wealth funds. However, as organized group boycotts, divest campaigns may be vulnerable to prosecution under antitrust law. This article explores the likelihood of success in such a case, considering the history of the legal treatment of organized boycotts, the scope and purpose of antitrust law, and the possible application of the First Amendment to the divestment context. The article finds that fossil fuel boycotts straddle a number of contradictory characteristics, making application of existing theories inadequate. In particular, existing precedent protects political boycotts, but not those with primarily economic objectives, and fails to definitively address whether a noncompetitive actor may undertake concerted action under antitrust law. In the context of climate change, where the political is economic, and political goals may seek significant economic changes (such as undermining an entire industry), existing theories may lead to a result that threatens both free expression and the health of the planet. The essential flexibility of the Sherman Act, however, provides room for protection of political activity, even where the ultimate objective is economic in nature.     

Best Available Techniques (BAT) and Coal-fired Power Stations: Can the Energy Gap be Plugged Without Increasing Emissions?

At present, there is much anxiety regarding the security ofenergy supplies; for example, the UK and other European Statesare set to become increasingly dependant upon imports of naturalgas from states with which political relations are often strained.These uncertainties are felt acutely by the electricity generatingsector, which is facing major challenges regarding the choiceof fuel mix in the years ahead. Nuclear energy may provide analternative; however, in the UK, progress in replacing the firstgeneration reactors is exceedingly slow. A number of operatorsare looking to coal as a means of plugging the energy gap. However,in the light of ever more stringent legal controls on emissions,this step cannot be taken without the adoption of sophisticatedpollution abatement technology. This article examines the rolewhich legal concepts such as Best Available Techniques (BAT)must play in bringing about these changes.     

Reconfiguring Law: An Ethnographic Perspective from Botswana

Using two marital disputes, this article examines women's experiences in bringing legal claims regarding family property in Botswana. It highlights the ways women draw on diverse economic and social resources available to them through their differing positions within gendered social networks that shape daily life and affect the ability to access and manipulate a legal system incorporating Tswana customary law and European law. The divergent discourses among women and between women and men document how the administrative and theoretical separation of legal systems does not extend to people's uses of the law in arranging their own lives. This analysis challenges the formalist model of legal pluralism by demonstrating that legal arguments are constructed from the gendered social and economic facts of individuals'lives that traverse the legal categories of European and customary law. It also contributes to feminist legal scholarship by explicitly marking the links among gender, power, and law.