Category Archives: Law: Everything Else

That the Senate has bestirred itself from its gridlock and lethargy long enough to confirm Judge Jordan is really great news. Judge Jordan was not only an uncontroversial pick, he is an excellent pick and a great judge. It is not inconceivable he will be on lists of potential Supreme Court Justices some day.

U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jose Jordan, a Miami Law graduate, was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Wednesday to serve on the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Judge Jordan graduated summa cum laude from the University of Miami School of Law in 1987, has been an adjunct professor since 1990, and is a member of the school’s visiting committee.

Nominated by President Barack Obama on Aug. 2, 2011, Judge Jordan is the first Cuban-American to sit on the 11th Circuit, which has jurisdiction over Florida, Georgia, and Alabama. The Senate vote was 94-5 in Jordan’s favor.

"Judge Adalberto José Jordan will bring an unwavering commitment to fairness and judicial integrity to the federal bench," President Obama said when he announced the nomination. "His impressive legal career is a testament to the kind of thoughtful and diligent judge he will be on the Eleventh Circuit. I am honored to nominate him today."

Miami Dean Patricia D. White called Judge Jordan’s elevation to the appeals bench "a magnificent appointment," and said the University of Miami "could not be prouder to have Judge Jordan as its alumnus and regular member of the adjunct faculty."

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who graduated from Miami Law in 1996, told the Daily Business Review in an article published Wednesday that Judge Jordan "has an extraordinary reputation in our community" and that he is "highly regarded for his intellect."

Judge Jordan has been a U.S. District Court Judge for the Southern District of Florida since 1999. He received the highest possible rating from the American Bar Association and has a stellar judicial record. Prior to that, he was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. While at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, he was Chief of the Appellate Division and Counsel on Legal Policy from 1998-1999. In the late 1980s, after obtaining his law degree, he was a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Before that, he had graduated magna cum laude from the University of Miami with a B.A. in Politics and Public Affairs.

Miami Law Professor Mary Coombs had Judge Jordan as a student in her first class at the school. He later served as her summer intern. "I haven’t found any better since," she said. "I am absolutely fantastically delighted. He is the combination of brilliance and decency and kindness. He is just extraordinary."

Judge Jordan will be the commencement speaker for Miami Law at its graduation ceremonies on May 12.

— University of Miami | School of Law – Judge Adalberto Jordan, JD '87, Confirmed To Appeals Court.

Very, very faithful readers may recall back in December 2007 I posted I Am A Plaintiff in which I recounted my discovery that I was part of a class of persons who had been subjected to improper foreign currency fees when using a US credit card abroad.

As I reported then, the proposed settlement offered me three choices:

1. $25 cash money.
2. Estimate how many days I was abroad in 1996-2006, and get a rebate of 1% of what they guess I spent with my credit card based on some formula they do not disclose. Key to that formula is whether I characterize my travel as sometimes/often/mostly “business,” “visiting friends or relatives,” or “vacation or leisure”. (In fact it was some of each.)
3. Provide detailed receipts of my credit card usage abroad in that period and get 3% back.

I chose option two, having calculated that I was abroad for 394 days during the relevant period.

Today, about three and half years after claims were due, I got my check — for $51.81. This doesn’t seem like much, as I’m sure I would have spent more than $5181 while doing a combination of fairly high-priced business travel, some holiday travel, and just being, over the space of more than a year. And indeed, the note attached to the check I received states that “All refund amounts are reduced because the full amount of all the claims exceeds the amount in the settlement fund.”

Poking around on the settlement website reveals very little about how they calculated this figure. I was not able to find a clear statement of what the settlement value was, what the lawyers’ share of the settlement was, or what was left after they took their share. I was able to learn that 10 million (10 million!) claims were filed. I was not able to learn what formula(e) the parties used to value the claims — something I’d have liked to see. I did, however, learn that the amount claimed exceeded the amount of the settlement, so that payments were reduced according to a complicated formula in the Court-approved Revised Plan of Administration and Distribution. But the site does not reveal which of the various contingency plans in that document were used, nor how much of a discount got applied to claims like mine. (If I understood it right, it does say that the folks who picked option one got their $25, so I didn’t get paid much for all the effort of going through old calendars and diaries and calculating the number of days I was abroad.)

All in all, one has a sense that the purpose of the claims web site is not to inform but to obfuscate, while appearing to meet some minimum formality of seeming disclosure.

Commonly, a complaint about class actions is that the victims don’t even bother to make claims. In this case that is emphatically not the case, since 10 million claims were filed (I’m not clear, though, if it was 10 million people, or if there may have been multiple claims by holders of multiple cards). But at the end of the day, even people like me who had what one would think would be a fairly substantial claim — abroad more than a year — gets peanuts. Without knowing the size of the settlement one can’t say whether it may serve some deterrent function in the future, but I have to wonder if it was large enough to achieve that.

Incidentally, the note attached to the check says there’s a second, separate lawsuit,, Ross v. American Express Co., regarding the mis-use of arbitration clauses. If you were forced into arbitration, don’t get your hopes up too high: that case was settled for $49.5 million, of which only $13.875 million remains after court costs and attorneys’ fees. Perhaps it is apt that lead class counsel have their offices on Locust Street?