Law360, New York (May 14, 2014, 4:11 PM EDT) -- Pennsylvania's Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law can impose additional — and sometimes inconsistent — restrictions on industries already subject to extensive regulation by state and federal authorities. Good arguments can be made that Pennsylvania should embrace, if not a full-blown safe harbor for highly regulated industries, at least a regulatory compliance defense to claims brought under the UTPCPL. In theory at least, regulatory authorities balance the cost of regulation against the value of restricting particular business conduct in promulgating and enforcing regulation. Private UTPCPL litigation does not weigh such considerations, focusing instead on the nature of the parties' conduct and losses in a single or series of transactions. Where a regulatory body has balanced the competing equities and elected to regulate business conduct in a certain manner, a business should be able to rely on its compliance with that regulation to show that its conduct was neither deceptive nor unfair in private UTPCPL litigation....