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Precautionary Ratemaking
Get PDFFor more than one hundred years, states have relied on ratemaking to ensure that electric utilities deliver affordable and reliable power to their customers. This process helped keep costs down, but it also produced an electricity system that is a cause of, and vulnerable to, some of the most pressing challenges now facing society: climate change, catastrophic wildfires, extreme storms, and air and water pollution.
This Article argues that risk regulation is an alternate legal foundation for interpreting bedrock principles of ratemaking, such as prudency, reasonableness, least cost, and the public interest. The traditional economic regulator view of ratemaking evaluates these principles in financial terms, generally focusing on near-term rate impacts and the utility’s financial viability. This often excludes consideration of options with far lower risk of health and environmental harms if those options would result in higher costs for ratepayers.
Ratemaking does not require public utilities commissions (PUCs) to wait for catastrophic events to occur, or regulations to change, before addressing risk. A state PUC’s authority is often quite broad, and courts recognize that each rate case is unique. The discretion granted by statutes and the courts allows PUCs to proactively manage risk without requiring new legislation. PUCs could improve social and environmental outcomes by focusing on a wider range of a ratemaking decision’s potential impacts and a longer time frame during which the impacts may occur. A more robust approach to risk management could also help the PUC achieve its traditional mandates of affordability and reliability.
This Article proposes a novel framework—precautionary ratemaking—to unlock the risk governance potential of the PUC. The Article begins with an overview of the ratemaking process and focuses on two guiding principles for a PUC’s approach to risk: least cost planning and the public interest. The Article points to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 decision in Federal Power Commission v. Hope Natural Gas as a turning point that limited PUCs’ public interest considerations. The Article then reframes ratemaking as risk governance, demonstrating how the process mitigates, allocates, and creates risk among utilities, ratepayers, and the general public. The discussion explains how these categories relate to electricity rates and therefore fall within the general jurisdiction of a PUC. The Article concludes with a framework for shifting ratemaking from a least cost to a least cost-least risk approach that is rooted in the precautionary principle
Social Justice as Desistance: Rethinking Approaches to Gender Violence
Get PDFPart I of this Article describes most domestic violence intervention programs (DVIPs) as they currently function with regard to gender violence. It critiques the structure of these programs, their close partnership with criminal legal system actors, perceived deficiencies, and it identifies missed opportunities to provide meaningful intervention strategies with those who have harmed. It demonstrates the ways that laws, regulations, and policies governing DVIPs constrain most programs from moving beyond established practices informed by punitive approaches to address the structural conditions that situate gender violence within a political economic framework.
Part II begins with a brief overview of the research on determinants of criminal behavior as applied to gender violence. It then examines the literature on desistance theory that demonstrates the benefits of social bonds in reducing criminal behavior. It posits that DVIPs can implement desistance theories by reconstituting program structures to promote social bonds for offenders through partnerships with social justice movements. These partnerships may help to address the determinants of transgressive behavior and promote political and social identities committed to social good.
Part III moves the analytical framework discussed in Part II into the realm of praxis. It offers several proposals for restructuring DVIPs to facilitate desistance through social justice partnerships. It advocates for DVIPs to disengage with the criminal legal system and tum to social justice collaborators through approaches informed by restorative and transformat:ive justice principles. Partnerships with social justice movements provide the opportunity for offenders to engage in collaborative efforts with groups that address the causes of gender violence and promise to provide mutual benefits between anti.domestic violence work and other forms of social justice advocacy. Part III argues that DVIP-social justice partnerships promise meaningful legal reforms to the benefit of IPV survivors and offenders and the organizations with which they collaborate. These legal reforms address the programs\u27 structural weaknesses, strengthen resources for survivors and offenders, and resituate DVIPs in the realm of progressive social justice efforts
Form Over Function: How \u3ci\u3eCollins v. Yellen\u3c/i\u3e Signals a Threat to the Independence of Multimember Financial Regulatory Agencies
Get PDFTaking Orders from Tweets: Redefining the First Amendment Boundaries of Executive Speech in the Age of Social Media
Get PDFRethinking Bayh-Dole\u27s Bad-Deal for the American Taxpayer Through the Lens of the NIH-Moderna Dispute
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