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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.

Why do people fight about water rights? Who decides how much water can be used by a city or irrigator? Does the federal government get involved in state water issues? Why is water in Colorado so controversial? These questions, and others like them, are addressed in Colorado Water Law for Non-Lawyers. This concise and understandable treatment of the complex web of Colorado water laws is the first book of its kind. Legal issues related to water rights in Colorado first surfaced during the gold mining era in the 1800s and continue to be contentious today with the explosive population growth of the twenty-first century. Drawing on geography and history, the authors explore the flashpoints and water wars that have shaped Colorado’s present system of water allocation and management. They also address how this system, developed in the mid-1800s, is standing up to current tests—including the drought of the past decade and the competing interests for scarce water resources—and predict how it will stand up to new demands in the future.

This book will appeal to at students, non-lawyers involved with water issues, and general readers interested in Colorado’s complex water rights law.

Risk and risk allocation have always been central issues in public utility regulation. Unfortunately, the term “risk” can easily be misrepresented and misinterpreted, especially when disconnected from long-standing principles of corporate finance.
This book provides those in the regulatory policy community with a basic theoretical and practical grounding in risk as it relates specifically to economic regulation in order to focus and elevate discourse about risk in the utility sector in the contemporary context of economic, technological, and regulatory change. This is not a “how-to” book with regard to calculating risks and returns but rather a resource that aims to improve understanding of the nature of risk. It draws from the fields of corporate finance, behavioral finance, and decision theory as well as the broader legal and economic theories that undergird institutional economics and the economic regulatory paradigm.
We exist in a world of scarce resources and abundant uncertainties, the combination of which can exacerbate and distort our sense of risk. Although there is understandable impulse to reduce risk, attempts to mitigate may be as likely to shift risk, and some measures might actually increase risk exposure. Many of the concepts explored here apply not just to financial decisions, such as those by utility investors, but also to regulatory and utility decision-making in general.