Does the Supreme Court of the United States Move Energy Markets?

This paper examines how U.S. Supreme Court energy rulings reflect and reshape market expectations, regulatory risk, and investor behavior across the energy sector. It develops a comparative framework across three channels of market reaction: direct-party effects, industry-peer spillover effects, and sector-wide repricing of regulatory risk. Drawing on event-study methodology and law-and-finance literature, this paper argues that Supreme Court energy rulings function not merely as legal resolutions but as information shocks through which investors reprice regulatory risk across affected industries. Case studies of FERC v. EPSA and Hughes v. PPL, alongside extensions to Atlantic Richfield and Maui, illustrate how each channel navigates trade-offs between firm-level stock price effects, sector-level energy-intensity effects, and the scope of judicial authority over energy markets. We conclude that Supreme Court rulings are not neutral legal events isolated from financial markets but exert measurable, uneven effects across firms and sectors, offering a diagnostic lens for understanding how judicial decisions transmit regulatory risk into asset prices.