Scott Hempling has assisted clients from all sectors of the electric industry, including regulators, utilities, consumer organizations, independent competitors, environmental organizations, and labor unions. As an expert witness, he has testified numerous times before state commissions; also before committees of the United States Congress and the legislatures of Arkansas, California, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia. As a teacher and seminar presenter, he has taught public utility law and policy to a generation of regulators and practitioners, appearing throughout the United States and in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Central America, England, Germany, India, Italy, Jamaica, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Peru, and Vanuatu.
Hempling’s legal treatise, Regulating Public Utility Performance: The Law of Market Structure, Pricing and Jurisdiction (Amer. Bar Assn. 2d ed. 2021), has been described as a “comprehensive regulatory treatise [that] warrants comparison with Kahn and Phillips.” It is used in law school and public policy courses at Stanford, University of California–Berkeley, Vermont Law School, Georgetown, George Washington and Washburn Law, among other graduate schools. His book Regulating Mergers and Acquisitions of U.S. Electric Utilities: Industry Concentration and Corporate Complication (Edward Elgar Publishing 2020) was described by an Energy Law Journal reviewer as “powerful and persuasive . . . a terrific book.” His book of essays, Preside or Lead? The Attributes and Actions of Effective Regulators, has been described as “matchless” and “timeless”; a Spanish translation has circulated throughout Latin America through the auspices of the Asociación Iberoamericana de Entidades Reguladoras de la Energía (an association of telecommunications regulators from Europe and Latin America) and the World Energy Forum.
His articles have appeared in the Energy Law Journal, the Electricity Journal, Energy Regulation Quarterly, Public Utilities Fortnightly, ElectricityPolicy.com, publications of the American Bar Association, and other professional publications. These articles cover such topics as mergers and acquisitions, the introduction of competition into formerly monopolistic markets, corporate restructuring, ratemaking, utility investments in nonutility businesses, transmission planning, renewable energy and state–federal jurisdictional issues. From 2006 to 2011, he was Executive Director of the National Regulatory Research Institute. From 2021 to 2024, he was an Administrative Law Judge at the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Hempling is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches a Fall course on public utility law and a Spring course on justice in the regulation of infrastructural industries. At Georgetown Law he has also taught regulatory litigation. He received a B.A. cum laude in (1) Economics and Political Science and (2) Music from Yale University, where he was awarded a Continental Grain Fellowship and a Patterson research grant. He received a J.D. magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center, where he was the recipient of an American Jurisprudence award for Constitutional Law. He is a member of the District of Columbia and Maryland Bars. A cellist, Hempling performs at the Jewish High Holy Day services held at the Riderwood Retirement Community.
See Hempling’s CV here.
