Blank Rome associate Emily S. Childress will serve as a speaker at the Energy & Mineral Law Foundation’s (“EMLF”) Fall Symposium, being held October 13 through 15, 2026, in Lexington, Kentucky. Blank Rome is pleased to be a sponsor of the event.

Emily’s session, “From Humphrey’s Executor to Slaughter: Presidential Removal Power and Agency Independence,” will take place on Wednesday, October 14, from 11:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.

About the Session

For nearly a century, Humphrey’s Executor provided the constitutional foundation for independent agency governance, until the Supreme Court’s June 2026 ruling in Trump v. Slaughter. With the Supreme Court holding that for-cause removal protections violate the separation of powers, every multimember commission faces new questions. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC”), which oversees more than one trillion dollars in annual energy commerce, is squarely in the spotlight. This session unpacks the constitutional shift. Then, drawing on the amicus brief filed by 11 bipartisan former FERC commissioners, the presentation examines whether ratemaking commissions can preserve their structural independence, and what’s at stake if they cannot.

Other sessions include:

  • Practical and Ethical Considerations When Managing Discovery
  • Educating Judges on Energy and Mineral Law
  • Fall Case Briefing
  • Powering Data Centers: Generation and Transmission Issues
  • On Guard! Ethically Avoiding Fraud and Scams
  • The Future of Coal
  • Workin’ 9 to 5? Recent Developments in Overtime Litigation
  • What’s the Harm in That?
  • Federal Leasing
  • Is Oil and Gas Title Getting More Complicated?
  • The Evolution of U.S. LNG
  • Incorporating Intermittent Renewables into the Grid
  • Connecting the Grid: Legal Challenges in Multi-State Transmission Projects

For more information, please visit the event webpage.