Some of the nation’s leading attorneys comment on the current economic situation.

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Walter Herring, a litigation partner at Powell Goldstein LLP, says the situation is simply unprecedented:

It's really too early to make realistic predictions about the legal implications of the proposed bailout. We simply have no “previous experience” to draw on. While there are some parallels with the S&L problems of the 1980s, the current crisis is much more complex. It's not simply a problem with a relatively small number of lenders in a particular lending industry who loaned money on hard assets that had some readily quantifiable (albeit much lower) value. More importantly, in the '80s we had other available credit sources to ease the losses and facilitate resolutions. Today we are faced with much more complex financial products and transactions, involving interwoven/interrelated players, on a much larger scale with unknown asset values — and therefore unknown losses — and a constrained credit market.