This tracker was launched February 14, 2022. It was last updated September 1, 2022.
The State Energy & Environmental Impact Center has created this tracker to collect court decisions reviewing orders of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).1 This tracker will be updated as new decisions are issued. It will also be expanded to cover earlier years.
Background
Under the statutes governing judicial review of FERC orders, the Federal Power Act and the Natural Gas Act, an aggrieved party must seek rehearing from FERC before filing a petition for review.2 Court decisions reviewing FERC orders thus typically review two orders – an order, and an order on rehearing.
FERC is composed of five members, with no more than 3 from any one political party. The chair is determined by the president.3 FERC must have a quorum of three commissioners participating to take an action. A commissioner might not participate in a case if they are recused due to a conflict or other issue.
In this tracker, we include the history of the FERC orders on review. We list the Commissioner composition and Chair at the time of the final FERC order that was subject to the court decision. And we note which orders include a dissent or partial dissent (commissioners also sometimes concur, but we have not separately listed that data in this tracker for brevity’s sake).
117 cases match your search. 13 were granted, 90 were denied, 13 were granted in part, denied in part. Download as CSV
- Court decisions are gathered from FERC’s website.
- 15 U.S.C. § 717r; 16 U.S.C. § 825l.
- The list of current and previous chairs is available here.
- This tracker uses the affiliation of the president who nominated the reviewing judge as a proxy for the judge’s ideology. If the decision was issued by a panel of judges that were not all nominated by a president of the same political party, we have indicated the party affiliation of the president for the majority of judges on the panel.
- This indicates the political party affiliation of the majority of the FERC commissioners participating in the last decision on review in the relevant court case. “Split” indicates that there was an even number of Democrats and Republicans on the Commission at the time.
- This indicates the FERC chair at the time of the last decision on review in the relevant court case.
- This includes Commissioners who dissented in part from the order or concurred in part and dissented in part.