Alexandra Klass
James G. Degnan Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School
Speaker Biography:
Alexandra B. Klass is the James G. Degnan Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. She teaches and writes primarily in the areas of energy law, environmental law, and natural resources law. In 2022 and 2023, she served in the Biden-Harris administration as Deputy General Counsel for Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy Demonstrations at the U.S. Department of Energy. Professor Klass’s recent scholarly work, published in many of the nation’s leading law journals, addresses regulatory and permitting challenges to integrating more renewable energy into the nation’s electric transmission grid, siting and eminent domain issues surrounding interstate electric transmission lines and oil and gas pipelines, and applications of the public trust doctrine to modern environmental law challenges. She is a co-author of Energy Law: Concepts and Insights Series (Foundation Press, 2d ed. 2020), Energy Law and Policy (West Academic Publishing, 3d ed. 2022), and Natural Resources Law: A Place-Based Book of Problems and Cases (Wolters Kluwer, 5th ed. 2022). Before joining the Michigan Law faculty in 2022, Professor Klass was a Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School, where she was a member of the faculty from 2006 to 2022. She has been a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Uppsala University (Sweden), and the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. Prior to her academic career, Professor Klass was a partner at Dorsey & Whitney LLP in Minneapolis, where she specialized in environmental law and land use litigation.
Abstract:
State public utility regulation in the energy sector is undergoing a rapid transformation driven by unprecedented levels of federal funding for clean energy deployment, the urgency of decarbonization due to climate change, and increasing demands for environmental and energy justice. This energy transition will intersect with many aspects of societal wellbeing. However, for decades, state utility regulators have protested that their role as economic regulators excludes a central role for “social policy.”
This Article contends that state public utility regulators are—and have always been—social policy makers that respond to historical and emerging social policy goals as an integral part of their statutory mandates to limit monopoly power in the energy sector and to set just and reasonable utility rates in the public interest. To explore this claim, we explore a range of contemporary social policy processes in the utility regulatory space that show regulators in both conservative and progressive states incorporating social policy concerns within dense and often opaque technocratic processes.
The theoretical, doctrinal, and process implications of fully reckoning with the longstanding role of social policy in utility regulation are potentially far reaching. These insights support the work of contemporary scholars attempting to reinvigorate the public utility ideal and apply it to emerging network and “infrastructure” industries like technology and financial platforms; they provide a doctrinal basis for courts to give state utility commissions more discretion to expressly and transparently incorporate social policy into their decisions in the absence of new statutory mandates; and they offer tools for advocates to more fully participate in what we describe as a social policy “process” that unfolds as a conversation between regulated parties, other stakeholders, state public utility commissioners, state legislators, and state courts.
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