So, where do we even begin with Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeffer, which is, first, a fascinating decision and, second, one that has already inspired countless stories in both the legal and financial media? I thought I would begin by passing along some of the better commentary I have come across in the wake of the decision, along with a few thoughts of my own.

First of all, the best substantive piece explaining what in the world the decision actually says is this one, from Thomas Clark on the Fiduciary Matters Blog. He does a nice job of explaining what the opinion really held. One of the things that grabbed me right off the bat about his post is that he opened by pointing out that, by the Court’s opinion, “the ‘Moench Presumption’ which has been adopted nearly unanimously by every Circuit Court in the country has been unequivocally rejected.” I appreciated the fact that he pointed out that the presumption had been adopted “nearly universally” by the circuits that have considered it, rather than calling it universally accepted, as I have long been the nitpicker on this, pointing out that the First Circuit has passed on opportunities to adopt the presumption, even though most authors writing on the subject have consistently but wrongly stated that the presumption had been universally accepted by those courts presented with it. Now, though, it turns out to have been universally accepted by all but two courts to have considered it, the First Circuit (as I have written before) and the Supreme Court, but obviously the decision of one of those two not to adopt it matters more than that of the other, by some significant degree of magnitude.

Second, I liked this brief piece by Squire Patton Boggs’ Larisa Vaysman in the Sixth Circuit Appellate Blog, comparing some of the conduct that the opinion could be construed to approve of by a fiduciary to conduct that one might have otherwise slurred as a Ponzi scheme. Substantively, she emphasizes that, under the Court’s holding, to plead an ERISA stock drop claim, “a plaintiff must plausibly allege an alternative action that the defendant could have taken that would have been consistent with the securities laws and that a prudent fiduciary . . . would not have viewed as more likely to harm the fund than help it.” What is interesting about this to me is that I have long considered the Moench presumption, no matter the complex doctrinal discussions that have grown up around it, to reflect a judicial need to find some way to balance fiduciary obligations under ERISA with securities obligations imposed on insiders by the securities laws. The Moench presumption always struck me as too blunt an instrument for those purposes, but that didn’t change the fact that, to me, some way of balancing those sometimes competing interests was necessary. Vaysman’s post highlights the fact that the Supreme Court did not abandon this need to balance the competing interests, but instead imposed a different means of balancing those interests. I think the Supreme Court did a nice job in Fifth Third of imposing that balancing by means of a factual evaluation of the conduct in question, rather than by a presumption, unsupported in ERISA itself, that simply, for all intents and purposes, had effectively barred such claims.

I also liked this financial trade press article, from Pensions & Investments, on the decision, as much as anything for its recognition that the decision drove home the point that “courts should evaluate stock-drop cases ‘through careful, context-sensitive scrutiny of a complaint’s allegations,’” rather than by means of a judicially created presumption that cannot be located in the ERISA statute itself. This is, of course, a drum I have always beaten about ERISA litigation and the Moench presumption in particular, which is that it is much more appropriate to delve into the facts to decide whether a case has merit, because the world – and a particular case – can look entirely different on its actual facts than it looks based on judicial assumptions made at the outset of a case, including when judicially created presumptions are applied without first examining the truth of the events at issue. I also liked the author’s emphasis on the fact that the opinion recognizes that the presumption simply had no basis under the statutory language itself.

Blogger – and friend – Susan Mangiero has called me on my promise, made in a prior post about predictions on the outcome of this case, to detail my views, once the decision was in, on whether the Court got it right. As my comments about the articles above probably made clear, I am fond of the decision and think the Court got it just right. They solved a troublesome riddle, which is how to balance the securities law obligations of corporate officers with ERISA’s fiduciary obligations, in a manner that neither distorted the statute – as was the case with the Moench presumption – nor encouraged the filing of stock drop suits against fiduciaries that lacked any basis other than the fact that a stock price had declined.