The Act also gave the SEC the power to limit holding companies to a geographic area so that individual states could regulate them.

The Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935 was passed by the 74th United States Congress as major New Deal reform legislation.

The law gave the SEC the authority to require registration of electric holding companies and lock them down geographically so that they were no longer able to evade state public utilities commissions.

Franklin D. Roosevelt also appointed him to be a member of his National Power Policy Committee that wrote the legislation that congress passed on August 24, 1935.

[10] Cohen, who received a Doctor of Juridical Science from Harvard, became a member of President Roosevelt's "Brain Trust" at the suggestion of Felix Frankfurter.

[11] At the time when Schlesinger used the term neo-Brandeisian, he was referring to the historic ideas of supreme court justice Louis Brandeis' views on United States antitrust law.

On December 7, 1935, the U.S. Attorney General and the SEC made a motion to stay all lawsuits that the electric industry had already filed in the D.C. District Court against the Act.

[19] He stated that the passage of the Act gave the SEC the authority to regulate electric holding companies and protect investors.

Instead section 11, he said was "akin to the philosophy of the Sherman Act" and "the utility house is being set in order" based on the findings and recommendations of the 1928-1935 Federal Trade Commission Investigation.

[7] EBASCo claimed that the U.S. Congress had no right to regulate its interstate activities, but both the court and the Federal Trade Commission investigation between 1928-35 documented that it had been selling services, securities and energy across state lines.

In his opinion, released on March 28, Chief Justice Hughes denied the defendant's argument as well as the Ebasco's attempt to block the Act from obtaining financial information to protect investors.

On Page 441-2 of the decision, Chief Justice Hughes quoted directly from the act and why Congress wanted to federal supervision of electric holding companies.

39, P. 462. dated 1943 made the following comment on the Act: "... there is no denying that [SEC policy] has helped investors by improving the financial status of many subsidiaries of utility holding companies..." In 1946 the University of Pennsylvania Law Review published "A Death Sentence or a New Lease On Life?

A Survey Of Corporate Adjustments Under the Public Utility Holding Company Act" By Robert M. Blair-Smith and Leonard Helfenstein (pg 148-201).

Their piece documented the process of how the SEC oversaw the reorganization the United Light and Power Company and its 75 subsidiaries (pg 161-188) over a ten-year period with the goal of protecting public investors.