  A contact four-fermion interaction between light quarks and electrons has
been evoked as a possible explanation for the excess of events observed by HERA
at high-$Q^2$. We explore the 1-loop effects of such interaction in $\Gamma(Z^0
\to e^+ e^-)$ measured at LEP and impose strong bounds on the lower limit of
the effective scale. Our results are able to discard some of the contact
interactions as possible explanation for the HERA events.
