Court Opinion

ID: 9467988
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:01:17.858827+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:40:37.409898
License: Public Domain

SAM D. JOHNSON, Circuit Judge,
specially concurring:
Although this writer joins in the majority opinion in this case, I wish to specially concur, not on a point of law, but on a matter of policy. Rather than permit the pipeline to “roll in” the cost of emergency gas supply purchases to all its customers, FERC ordered the pipeline either to incre*1117mentally price this cost to those whose curtailment was offset by the purchases, or to act as a broker for customers desiring to pay the actual cost for that gas. In return for enjoying the full benefit of the emergency purchases, FERC’s order requires that the benefited low priority customer bear the full cost of his decision to consume that gas. This increases the efficient allocation of resources to the extent that the market price of the emergency purchase gas reflects the social cost of its consumption.1
FERC’s order is but one example of an increased willingness to experiment with market-like allocations within a regulatory framework, all toward the goal of refining and improving traditional administrative regulation of the allocation of scarce resources. This trend of innovation has already been approvingly commented on in the legal literature.2 Our affirmance here should be taken as adding judicial approval to these regulatory steps forward and should especially encourage FERC to continue with its efforts in this vein.

. See Markovits, A Basic Structure for Micro-economic Policy Analysis in Our Worse-Than-Second Best World: A Proposal and Critique of the Chicago Approach to the Study of Law and Economics, 1975 Wisc.L.Rev. 950.

. Note, The Case for a White Market in the Allocation of Natural Gas During Shortages, 57 Texas L.Rev. 615 (1979).