The City Council’s recent passage of the Alcohol Density Plan — which prohibits the issuance of new liquor licenses in the downtown area — was not the first time this decade that city officials attempted to regulate students into a state of sobriety, as proceedings at the Wisconsin Supreme Court last week reminded us.

In 2002, the University of Wisconsin’s Policy Alternatives Community and Education (PACE) project conducted a study linking drink specials to alcohol-related problems downtown. Along with city officials, PACE began a campaign to get bars to drop the deals, threatening to ban specials legislatively if need be. Reacting to the pressure, 24 downtown bars in September 2002 agreed to “voluntarily” ban drink specials after 8 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights.

Predictably, the ban did little to temper students’ taste for consuming large amounts of alcohol. It did lead a group of UW students to file a class-action lawsuit against the 24 bars in 2004, however, alleging the voluntary ban was an illegal conspiracy to fix prices in violation of antitrust laws. The bars ditched the ban when the suit was filed.

The circuit court dismissed the lawsuit on summary judgment, ruling antitrust laws should not apply because the bars enacted the ban under “regulatory demands” from the city. An appeals court upheld the dismissal.

Now the Supreme Court will decide whether to uphold the appellate court’s decision or to reinstate the lawsuit. The high court heard oral arguments last week.

On its face, the drink special ban was a collusive act on the part of the bars. Indeed, some establishments might have been only too happy to go along with a plan that promised higher profit margins and little risk of losing market share. In that sense, the drink special ban shares a perverse commonality with the density plan, which essentially shields existing downtown bars from any new competition for the indefinite future.

Yet there was never any indication that the bar owners planned to collude absent heavy pressure from the city and PACE. We cannot see how justice would be served by punishing the bars for doing what they did under the threat of an ordinance that would have created even more stringent drink special regulations.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court should kill this lawsuit once and for all. We only regret that no one can do the same to the city’s misguided and anti-capitalist approach toward downtown alcohol policy.