Solar Tours v. Luis Macias d/b/a Tournet Systems
- Gerard Lynch
- 1:05-cv-05597
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 2
In Solar Tours v. Macias, Judge Torres denied settlement enforcement for lack of jurisdiction and denied related requests and sanctions motions.
Luis Macias’s effort to reopen the discontinued case and enforce the purported settlement was denied; Solar Tours, Inc. and Macias both had their sanctions motions denied, and related requests were denied as moot.
What happened
Solar Tours, Inc. v. Luis Macias d/b/a Tournet Systems concerned Luis Macias’s request to reopen the discontinued case and enforce a purported May 2006 settlement agreement. The case had been discontinued with prejudice, and no party sought to restore it by the deadline set in the discontinuance order.
The court ruled that it lacked jurisdiction to enforce the settlement because the earlier order neither included the settlement’s terms nor reserved jurisdiction to enforce them. The court denied Macias’s motion, denied as moot other requests related to that motion, and said Macias could bring a separate breach-of-contract lawsuit in an appropriate forum.
Judge Analisa Torres also denied Macias’s and Solar Tours’s cross-motions for sanctions, finding that neither party provided enough evidence to establish a violation of the rule governing improper filings. The order directed the Clerk to terminate the listed motions.
The detailed version
- Solar Tours v. Luis Macias d/b/a Tournet Systems · No. 1:05-cv-05597
- Gerard Lynch
- Sept. 29, 2025
Background
On October 15, 2024, Defendant Luis Macias, representing himself, moved to reopen the case and enforce a purported settlement agreement from May 2006. The case had been discontinued with prejudice on May 12, 2006, based on the parties’ purported settlement. The settlement agreement was not filed on the public docket.
The discontinuance order allowed Solar Tours to apply by June 12, 2006, to restore the action if the settlement was not completed. No party sought restoration by that deadline, and no party filed anything in the case until Macias filed his motion in 2024.
Settlement-enforcement ruling
The court denied Macias’s motion because it did not have jurisdiction to enforce the settlement agreement. Applying the Supreme Court’s rule in Kokkonen v. Guardian Life Insurance Co. of America, the court explained that a federal court generally does not retain authority to enforce a settlement after dismissing a case unless the dismissal order either incorporates the settlement’s terms or expressly reserves authority to enforce it.
Neither condition existed here. The discontinuance order did not include the settlement terms and did not say that the court retained jurisdiction over the settlement. The court therefore denied the motion. It stated that Macias remained free to bring a separate breach-of-contract lawsuit against Solar Tours in an appropriate forum.
Other motions
The parties submitted additional requests concerning the motion to reopen and enforce, including Solar Tours’s request for permission to file a sur-reply and another motion filed by Macias. Because those requests sought relief related to the underlying motion, the court denied them as moot, meaning the court found no need to decide them after denying the underlying motion.
Macias also filed a motion seeking sanctions and punitive damages against Solar Tours. Solar Tours filed a cross-motion for sanctions. The court declined to impose sanctions in its discretion and concluded that neither party had presented sufficient evidence to meet the demanding standard for showing a violation of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11(b). The court denied both sanctions motions and directed the Clerk of Court to terminate the motions listed at docket entries 22, 31, 33, 36, and 40.
Read the full 2-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.