For the past several decades, a climate of deregulation has encompassed industries ranging from public utilities to mass transportation. Harry Martin Trebing has been at the forefront of this debate as one of the world’s foremost specialists in the field of public utility regulation. Warren J. Samuels and Edythe S. Miller have collected a series of articles that assess Trebing’s theories on public utility regulation while examining his towering contribution to the field.

The Politics of Public Utility Regulation focuses on the important and increasingly controversial issues of utility regulation by combining a sophisticated understanding of these issues with a rigorous examination of various regulatory arrangements across the American states. It draws on interviews with participants in twelve states: public utility commissioners, commission staff members, utility company executives, governmental consumer advocates, and citizen activists. In addition to offering an up-to-date, comprehensive survey of regulatory politics at the state level, Gormley makes specific proposals for regulatory reform and emphasizes the importance (and difficulty) of assuring both expertise and accountability. Students of politics and public policy will find the state-level approach useful in examining the strategies of the “New Federalism” that transfer more and more formerly federal responsibilities to the states.