Preside or Lead? The Attributes and Actions of Effective Regulators

From local speed limits to federal water quality rules, all regulation has a common purpose: to align private behavior with the public interest.

These essays address a species of regulation: the regulation of our public utilities. These providers of electricity, gas, telecommunications, and water support our local, regional, national, and international economies. Our lives depend on their performance. Defining and demanding that performance is the job of regulators. Regulators set standards, compensate the efficient and penalize the inefficient. These standards, compensation, and penalties align private behavior with the public interest.

Scott Hempling is the Executive Director of the National Regulatory Research Institute. As an attorney in private practice, he represented many state commissions. His legal and policy research has included mergers and acquisitions, the introduction of competition into formerly monopolistic markets, corporate restructuring, ratemaking, utility investments in nonutility businesses, and state-federal jurisdictional issues.

Mr. Hempling received a B.A. cum laude in (1) Economics and Political Science and (2) Music from Yale University, where he was a recipient of 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 has appeared numerous times before committees of the U. S. Congress and before state legislative committees in Arkansas, California, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, Vermont, and Virginia. He has published articles in The Electricity Journal, Public Utilities Fortnightly, and other professional publications.