Vatican

Somebody saw Godfather III...

Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI raises some complicated questions about legal immunity. The moral of the story? He may want to get comfortable never leaving Vatican City.

* Bank of America agreed to pay $2.43 billion, one of the biggest securities class-action settlements in history, to put the Merrill Lynch mess behind it. According to Professors Peter Henning and Steven Davidoff, B of A “is probably quite happy with the settlement given that it could have potentially faced billions of dollars more in liability in the case.” [DealBook / New York Times]

* “Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the Honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting.” Here is Robert Barnes’s take on the SCOTUS Term that starts today. [Washington Post]

* And here is Professor Garrett Epps’s review of Jeffrey Toobin’s new book on the Supreme Court, The Oath (affiliate link). [New York Times]

* How Dewey justify paying a big bonus to a member of the management team “when it has been widely pointed out that excessive compensation to the firm’s upper management significantly contributed to the firm’s collapse in the first place?” [Bankruptcy Beat via WSJ Law Blog]

* A high-profile Vatican trial raises these questions: “‘Did the butler do it?’ Or rather, ‘was it only the butler who did it?’” [Christian Science Monitor]

* Ben Ogden, an Allen & Overy associate who was killed in a Nepalese plane crash, R.I.P. [Am Law Daily]

I’m not sure it’s fair to call the Vatican “homophobic.” Homophobia contemplates a kind of fear. It’s a prejudice that, like so many, comes out of ignorance. The Vatican is different. They think they’re at war with gays and lesbians — and who knows how many of these guys are at war with their own […]

Sigh. I love it when the U.S. Government casts its lot with foreign entities that export child molesters to the United States. The WSJ Law Blog reports: In a filing made late last week, the U.S. government weighed in, largely siding with the Vatican’s argument that the Ninth Circuit erred by allowing a sex-abuse case […]