Last month, Congress cleared the way for the families of people killed in the 9/11 terror attacks to sue the Saudi Arabian government for any role it may have played.

Despite the more favorable legal landscape, the 9/11 plaintiffs — some 9,000 of them — still face formidable obstacles in their fight to win reparations from the conservative desert kingdom, the homeland of 15 of the 19 hijackers. And even their lawyers acknowledge that families will probably never get a formal Saudi admission of complicity. One big obstacle is that there is likely to be continued political battles over the bill.