On this episode of Free Range, host Mike Livermore is joined by Vanderbilt law professor Ganesh Sitaraman and University of Pennsylvania law professor Shelley Welton. Both guests are experts in regulatory policy and are co-authors of a new case book Networks, Platforms, and Utilities.

Case books serve as the academic bedrock of law school classes. They are collections of seminal cases that facilitate the understanding of a specific field of law. Networks, Platforms, and Utilities collects primary source material that cover infrastructure areas such as transportation, communications, energy, finance, and technology. The subject of regulated industries has fallen away as a law school class in recent decades, but the industries did not disappear, nor did an important role for law and regulation. Networks, Platforms, and Utilities is intended to revitalize this area of teaching and scholarship (0:45-23:36).

One key distinction that helps structure the conversation on regulation is the difference between economic and social regulation. Economic regulation essentially overseas an industrial area, generally with the purpose of managing a natural monopoly. Social regulation addresses a wider range of political purposes, including addressing externalities such as pollution. In both types of regulation, questions of governance, democratic accountability, and social justice are present. And, of course, these two categories sometimes overlap (23:37-31:51). Net metering is an examples of a case of economic regulation that is also intertwined with broader social issues, particularly climate change, given the effects of that policy on renewable energy adoption (31:52-39:17).

Many of the cases covered in the book interact with antitrust law. In utilities-related cases, introducing competition as a remedy is not an appropriate solution for the marketplace. In situations creating competitive markets is not feasible, there is a second set of tools that can help achieve social goals in regulated, non-competitive markets. In these cases, the democratic process helps determine what goals the regulator should try to achieve (39:18-54:48).

Livermore, Sitaraman, and Welton discuss how to deliberate over these issues. One key question is whether it is possible to have robust participation when many of the questions regulators face are highly technical. Welton ends by discussion a hopeful example of powerful public participation is a series of conversations held by the New York Public Service Commission with low income ratepayers across New York. In her view, these individuals, who engaged in a particular governance process, were able to tell their stories and eventually push New York to adopt a different method of pricing electricity (54:49-1:04:11). Overall, Sitaraman and Welton are optimistic that the current political movement is shifting in favor of greater economic regulation, so that the law examined in Networks, Platforms and Utilities will only grow in coming years.