Netting opinion
A legal opinion — at the best of times a dreary, charmless and pointless affair — addressing the effectiveness in a given jurisdiction of close-out netting, one of the most soul-obliterating questions a grown adult can ask.
They tend to be long, academic, laden with hypotheticals, appealing to Latinate principles of civil law and demanding of unusually skilled powers of comprehension and patience to wade through.
Every netting opinion says the same thing: that netting is, ultimately, enforceable, because it would have no reason to exist if it said the contrary. But God — manifesting Herself in the shape of the Basel Committee on Banking Regulations and Supervisory Practices, plays a cruel cosmic joke on all inhouse lawyers. By diktat of the latest Basel Accord) they must diligently read and draw reasoned conclusions from these God-forsaken tomes, so that their firm's financial controllers can recognize balance sheet reductions as a result.
Red Flag Act
Also, it is a fact, that no insolvency administrator, anywhere in the world, in the history of the world, has ever actually successfully challenged the netting down of offsetting transactions under a derivative trading agreement — or so far as this commentator knows, even tried to — because that would be a patently stupid thing to do, even by accident.