The Law of Public Utilities:
Bringing Competition to Historically Monopolistic Industries

Scott Hempling’s 12-Week Course, Starting Sept. 9, 2026
For Lawyers and Nonlawyers

"Professor Hempling is an amazing teacher. He is able to phrase or explain things in a way that is easily digestible for a wide variety of people while not skimping on the material."

"The content is so well organized and well presented that I believe it can help anyone make a step change in the quality of work they are doing, while understanding why it is so important."

Registration Details

Dates:  Wednesdays Sept. 9, 2026 through Nov. 25, 2026.

Time:   7:00 to 8:30 pm Eastern.

Total instruction: 18 hours (12 sessions, 1.5 hours each).

Register here.

Registration closes: Sept. 8, 2026.

Continuing Legal Education:  Attendees apply for CLE credit in their individual states. We will provide all materials typically required by crediting agencies: materials, calendar, certificate of attendance. The certificate will indicate the number of hours that the attendee was online. Since 1997, as far we know, every Hempling seminar attendee seeking CLE credit has received it.

Missed classes: For those unable to attend a live class session, we will post a recording in the Learning Management System within 24 hours. Each recording will be available for six days. 

Price

• Government, academia, cooperatives, and public-interest organizations: $645.
• For-profit companies (including (a) for-profit lawyers for the above organizations, and (b) trade associations of for-profit companies): $1195.
• Group rates: Contact shempling@scotthemplinglaw.com.
• Price includes e-version of the course textbook, Regulating Public Utility Performance: The Law of Market Structure, Pricing and Jurisdiction (Amer. Bar. Assoc. 2d ed. 2021) ($139 value).

Refunds: Registrants who cancel before Sept. 8, 2026 will receive a refund of the official price less $150 to cover fulfillment and processing costs. (You keep the book.) To request a refund, email candis.miller.j@gmail.com.

Caution: This is not a "PowerPoint" course, worn down and dulled down to a series of oversimplified slides. It is a serious, detailed, graduate-level seminar based on Hempling's textbook and his longstanding course at Georgetown University Law Center.

Questions?  On substance, shempling@scotthemplinglaw.com. On logistics and administration, candis.miller.j@gmail.com.

Materials You Will Receive

Serious education deserves serious materials. Real text, not PowerPoint slides.  Specifically:

• an e-version of Hempling's textbook, Regulating Public Utility Performance: The Law of Market Structure, Pricing, and Jurisdiction (American Bar Association 2d ed. 2021) ($139 value, included in your webinar price). Reading the assignment before each week's class is essential. Early registration will ensure that you receive your book before the course begins.
• a chapter-by-chapter review study list of "Principles and Propositions Any Utility Regulatory Practitioner Needs to Know."
• a 200-page document "Questions and Answers on Utility Law"--containing dozens of questions from years of Hempling's Georgetown Law students and his detailed answers.
• 25 pages of industry diagrams displayed during the course.
• Online free access to Hempling's book Preside or Lead? The Attributes and Actions of Effective Regulators (2d ed. 2013) (already available to the public).
• Online, free access to Hempling's book Regulating Mergers and Acquisitions of U.S. Electric Utilities: Industry Concentration and Corporate Complication (Edward Elgar Publishing 2020) (already available to the public).

Schedule

Introduction

Week 1: Regulatory Law's Purposes, Dimensions, and Professions [Sept. 9]

Market Structure

Week 2:  Rights, Obligations and Powers of the Traditional Utility Monopoly [Sept. 16]
Week 3:  Authorizing Competition in Traditional Monopoly Markets [Sept. 23]
Week 4:  Making Authorized Competition Effective Competition [Sept. 30]
Week 5:  Factors and Behaviors that Undermine Effective Competition: Entry barriers, Monopolizing, and Manipulating [Oct. 7]

Pricing and Sales of Services

Week 6: Cost-Based Rates (the just-and-reasonable standard, revenue requirement equations, imprudence, and bad luck) [Oct. 14]
Week 7:  More on cost-based rates (constitutional limits, rate design, risk reduction, "incentives"); Market-based rates (screening and monitoring for market power) [Oct. 21]
Week 8:  Discrimination, Due and Undue; Mobile-Sierra [Oct. 28]
Week 9:  Filed-Rate Doctrine; Retroactive Ratemaking [Nov. 4]

Mergers and Acquisitions

Week 10:  Corporate Structure; Mergers and Acquisitions [Nov. 11]

Federal-State Jurisdictional Relations

Week 11:  Three Limits on Federal Authority [Nov. 18]
Week 12:  Two Limits on State Authority; Models for State-Federal Jurisdictional Relationships [Nov. 25]

Click here for detailed syllabus

Course Purpose

          Since the early 20th century, our nation has depended on regulated utility monopolies for electricity, natural gas, telecommunications, and water. Originally monopolistic, these industries today (other than water) host ambitious new entrants: in electricity and gas, providers of renewable energy, storage, and energy efficiency services; in telecommunications, providers of cell phones, broadband access, internet content and more. For nearly 40 years (50 for telecommunications), state and federal policymakers have worked to introduce competition into these industries.

          Conflicting with this energetic, decentralized, procompetitive activity is a four-decade industry march toward consolidation. Because of continuous mergers and acquisitions since the 1980s, your electric or gas company, local and standalone for most the 20th century, is now likely only one subsidiary of a multiutility, multistate, even multi-industry and multinational holding company. Consider telecommunications. AT&T's original vertically integrated monopoly, broken up by a 1984 antitrust decree, has now reacquired much of the decree required it to divest. Meanwhile, major communications incumbents are merging with major content providers. And of the more than 100 local electric companies that existed in 1985, only around a dozen remain local and standalone.  Similar acquisitions and consolidations are now coming to local and regional water companies.

          These industry actions produce continuous conflict: between (a) the incumbents, still advantaged by their legacy monopoly status; and (b) the new entrants, seeking to inject diversity, innovation and competition. The regulatory principles and practices that exist to address this continuous conflict is the primary subject of this course.

          To reduce, prevent, and respond to these conflicts, Congress and state legislatures have enacted regulatory statutes, and created regulatory commissions to administer those statutes. Those statutes, and the principles developed by those commissions, are the subjects of this course.

          Regardless of the industry or era, and regardless of whether the source of regulatory law is state or federal, regulation of public utilities has had six common elements:

• Mission: to align utility performance with the public interest;
• Legal principles: Ranging from the state law on exclusive monopoly franchise to federal constitutional protection of shareholder investment;
• Policy flexibility: Accommodating multiple market structures, from monopolies to competition; and multiple public purposes, from reliability to environmental accountability;
• State-federal jurisdictional relationships: Which aspects of utility service are "national," favoring requiring uniformity; and which are "local," favoring state experimentation;
• Dependence on multiple professional disciplines: Law, economics, finance, accounting, management, engineering and politics; and
• Administrative procedures: Rulemaking, adjudication, and enforcement.

          Today, new political challenges are causing legislators and regulators to stretch utility regulation's core principles and processes. Three examples of these challenges:

• Climate change: To what extent should we make utilities and their customers responsible for "greening" energy production and consumption?
• Universal service: Should we promise broadband to every home and business, and at whose cost? Should all content have nondiscriminatory access to all users?
• Affordability: What if the actual cost of service makes the price of service unaffordable for some?
• Privacy: How do regulators induce personal changes in energy consumption while protecting the related data from public exposure?

These traditional elements, new challenges, and constants also will arise during this course.

What I Hope for You to Learn

On completing this course you will be able to:

• apply longstanding legal and policy principles apply to regulation's new challenges: data centers, climate change, renewable energy penetration, smart grid, privacy, cybersecurity, economic justice, affordability, internet neutrality, and more;
• recognize and critique the multiple and conflicting purposes of economic regulation; then articulate your own law-based definition of the "public interest"a phrase appearing in every regulatory statute;
• develop and use a mental file cabinet that stores and organizes the substantive legal principles that utility regulators use to (a) induce the performance of monopolies and (b) convert monopoly markets into effectively competitive markets;
• describe the complementary and conflicting roles of competition and regulation, not as ideological poles, not as weapons in a century-long struggle for market control, but as tools one can combine, productively or counterproductively, to improve or diminish a market's performance;
• explain that today's regulated industries reflect both old-world policies and new- world technologies, and then see why efforts to transform historically monopoly markets into competitive markets is exceedingly difficult legally, physically, economically and politically;
• evaluate the effectiveness of a regulatory policy, in terms of the multiple dimensions of performance; e.g., costs, quality, competitiveness and innovation;
• describe how our dual-jurisdictional system, federal and state, makes regulatory policymaking simultaneously rich and frustrating, requiring decision-makers to grasp and value both the local and the national;
• see how the major forms of government decision-makinglegislation, rulemaking, adjudication and judicial review, at the state and federal levelswork together, or in conflict, to produce or undermine policy; and
• compare the multiple roles lawyers play in this field; and how those roles make use of experts and expertise from the disciplines of economics, accounting, finance, engineering, management and politics.

You will also learn, among many things,

• the law that tells you how to set rates without violating the U.S. Constitution;
• how to distinguish "due discrimination" from "undue" discrimination;
• the many regulatory steps necessary to convert monopoly markets into competitive markets;
• how a utility that has committed multiple felonies leading to death and destruction and including obstruction of justice, can manage still to be a state-protected monopoly;
• the difference between "monopolies" from "monopolizers";
• the difference between anticompetitive conduct from unearned advantage--and why it matters;
• why "deregulation" is a misnomer;
• how the 40-year M&A trend is changing utilities' corporate and market structure, leading to the consolidation and complication of historically low-risk, locally focused companies;
• why 90-year-old regulatory statute makes state-federal regulatory relations so awkward;
• how the statutory "public interest" could include, if addressed lawfully, such societal values as environmental protection, stability, and civil rights; and
• why some regulators are so much better at their jobs than others.

What Prior Students Have Said

          Since 1997, thousands of regulatory professionals have learned public utility law at my courses. Just as lawyers need to understand engineering, accounting, finance, economics, and management, professionals from those disciplines need to understand law. I have aimed to make the textbook and the course accessible to all these professionals. Here is what some have said:

 Professor Hempling is an amazing teacher and able to phrase or explain things that is easily digestible for a wide variety of people while not skimping on the material.

This class was among the best I have taken (including my law school courses) and I greatly enjoyed the depth and breadth of the course materials and discussions. I was impressed by Prof. Hempling's dedication to the subject matter and his willingness to indulge class participants with his time in answering questions (including past the class time allowed). As an attorney who recently transitioned into utility regulation, I will look back fondly on the experience of this course for a long time to come.

Extremely well organized and valuable content.

The textbook was my favorite part of this course. Scott's publication is a gold mine for utility lawyers! I really appreciate the class, but I loved the text book.

Not only does this class provide me with useful information, it provides me with a new way of thinking and questioning how the law functions, even outside of energy and monopoly regulation.

In this time of great change in the utility industry, a course like this, with legal history and in-depth lectures on current competitive issues is invaluable.

There was one particular week where Scott explained depreciation so plainly and clearly that I feel like that class made the entire series worth it, alone.

Incredibly helpful course! I have already changed my outlook at work on different items. Now, I ask the question "is this constitutional"? Scott also gave a fantastic framing of the interrelatedness of each part of the power system.

The content is so well organized and well presented that I believe it can help anyone make a step change in the quality of work they are doing, while understanding why it is so important.

Every course session and reading assignment was useful to me, and helped piece together some part of my job, my thought process, or in knowing how to better educate myself. I am so thankful for this course! I would take the course again if given the opportunity, to continue to let everything sink in and to begin to dive deeper into some of the concepts.

Mr. Hempling has an encyclopedic knowledge of regulatory law.

About Scott Hempling           Since 1997, Scott Hempling taught regulatory law and policy to thousands—law students, newcomers, veteran practitioners, lawyers, and nonlawyers. He has advised and testified before numerous state utility commissions, and appeared frequently before U.S. congressional and state legislative committees. He has addressed audiences throughout the United States and in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Central America, England, Germany, India, Italy, Jamaica, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Peru, and Vanuatu.            Along with many journal articles, Hempling has authored three books on utility regulation: Regulating Public Utility Performance:  The Law of Market Structure, Pricing and Jurisdiction (American Bar Association 2d ed. 2021) (described as "a joy  for the veteran, essential reading for the newcomer"); Preside or Lead? The Attributes and Actions of Effective Regulators (described by former commissioners as "matchless" and "timeless"); and Regulating Mergers and Acquisitions of U.S. Electric Utilities: Industry Consolidation and Corporate Complication (Edward Elgar Publishing 2020) (described in an Energy Law Journal review as "powerful and persuasive . . . a terrific book").            An advisor to regulatory agencies and industry participants, Hempling is an adjunct professor at Georgetown Law. He was Executive Director of the U.S. National Regulatory Research Institute, and an Administrative Law Judge at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.  He received a B.A. cum laude from Yale University in (1) Economics and Political Science and (2) Music, and a J.D. magna cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center. A cellist, Hempling performs annually at the Riderwood Retirement Community's Jewish High Holy Day services.