This Essay argues that bankruptcy proceedings are well-suited to resolving mass tort claims. Mass tort cases create a collective action problem that encourages claimants who are worried about available recoveries to race to the courthouse to collect ahead of others. This race can destroy going...

Many electric utilities in the United States own rate regulated and non-rate regulated subsidiaries. The rate regulated subsidiaries enjoy legal monopolies and a right to a return on their capital investments but are only allowed to charge regulatorily authorized rates. The non-rate regulated...

Devised in the aftermath of the most severe financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) was enacted to reduce risk, increase transparency, and promote market integrity. Since Dodd-Frank was signed into law in 2010, the...

Rate regulated public utilities own and operate one-third of U.S generators and nearly all the transmission and distribution system. These firms receive special regulatory treatment because they are protected from competition and subject to rate caps. In the past decade, they also have been at...

Do voluntary corporate prosocial efforts reduce or amplify support for government regulation? We build a theory of opposing mechanisms. Voluntary efforts could make it seem like the problem is being fixed (“Coca-Cola is already tackling plastic waste!”) and thus that regulation is...

Bankruptcy has a tort problem. Chapter 11 predictably subordinates the claims of tort and other involuntary creditors to those of financial lenders, a fact which encourages firms to rely excessively on secured debt and discount the interests of those they might incidentally harm. For this...

Scott Hempling’s Regulating Mergers and Acquisitions of U.S. Electric Utilities provides a comprehensive history of electric utility mergers in the United States since the 1980s. Hempling documents the dramatic consolidation the industry has seen in the past fifty years, and he convincingly...

Five years ago, in his piece on capacity markets, Jay Morrison discussed what he then viewed as the anticompetitive and arbitrary aspects of FERC’s shifting Minimum Offer Price Rules (MOPR) and their interference with private ordering and state policymaking. MOPRs allow administrative bodies,...

This Article interprets a trio of recent Supreme Court cases that addressed jurisdictional disputes in energy markets to identify which policies respect the Federal Power Act’s (FPA’s) system of distributing jurisdiction and which do not. While judges and scholars have construed these cases...

In the 1990s, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) stopped treatingpower generation as a regulated monopoly and supported the development of competitiveelectricity markets. Competition has encouraged innovation and reduced costs, but thepayment system FERC and grid operators developed...