News-Record.com

Our interview with AG Roy Cooper today included a discussion of price-gouging. As everyone knows, he launched an investigation of gas stations pointed out in complaints for bumping up prices on Sept. 12.

This is the first test of the state's 2006 price-gouging law, and I suspect the law may earn an F when the first case goes to court.

Its major weakness is its imprecision. It prohibits charging prices that are "unreasonably excessive under the circumstances."

What's that?

Cooper's answer: The courts haven't determined that yet.

The courts? What happened to the idea of judicial restraint? Here the state expects the courts to fill in a big blank in this law.

This is like passing a law to prohibit crime, then leaving it to the courts to determine what the crime is and whether you've broken it.

Different courts aren't even likely to agree with each other.

Maybe a court in Guilford County will decide that a gas station in Guilford County was charging an unreasonably excessive price at $4.20 a gallon, and a court in Mecklenburg County will decide that a station there wasn't charging an unreasonably excessive price at $4.25.

What the heck! Let the Court of Appeals sort it out.

I understand the drafters of this law didn't want to get precise because that would invite retailers to gouge right up to the legal limit. The problem here is that the legal limit now is what a judge says it is.

Isn't that how they determine what's pornography? Have we all agreed on that yet?

If the legislature wanted to declare price-gouging obscene, it should have defined what it is.