Court holds that U.S. Postal Service can’t be sued over intentionally misdelivered mail

A divided Supreme Courtroom sided with the federal authorities on Tuesday in U.S. Postal Service v. Konan, a dispute over mishandled mail. Writing for a 5-4 majority, Justice Clarence Thomas defined {that a} legislation defending the U.S. Postal Service from lawsuits over misplaced or miscarried mail bars lawsuits over mail that was deliberately misdelivered.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wherein she argued that almost all opinion supplied the U.S. Postal Service way more safety from lawsuits than Congress had supposed to provide it. “It isn’t the function of the Judiciary to supplant the selection Congress made as a result of it might have chosen in a different way,” she wrote.

The case emerged from a battle between a landlord and postal staff in Euless, Texas. The owner, Lebene Konan, spent years preventing to have her mail and mail belonging to her tenants delivered to a shared mailbox, however postal staff repeatedly held it on the submit workplace or returned it to the sender, contending that Konan had not met identification necessities for all addressees.

Finally, Konan sued the U.S. Postal Service, two postal staff, and the US, for, amongst different issues, infliction of emotional misery and enterprise interference, arguing that she was a sufferer of racial discrimination and that the mail supply drama had made it tougher for her to seek out and hold tenants. The Supreme Courtroom case addressed solely her claims in opposition to the U.S. Postal Service and United States underneath the Federal Tort Claims Act, which outlines the circumstances wherein the federal authorities may be sued for damages.

Particularly, the justices have been requested to resolve a disagreement between the federal courts of appeals over the scope of the FTCA’s postal exception, which protects the federal government from fits “arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.” The federal government contended that the postal exception bars Konan’s claims, as a result of intentional nondelivery of mail is a type of “loss” or “miscarriage.” Konan, then again, argued that the postal exception doesn’t cowl intentional acts.

On Tuesday, the courtroom sided with the federal government, holding that an intentional failure to ship the mail falls throughout the FTCA’s postal exception. The peculiar meanings of each “miscarriage” and “loss” level the courtroom to this conclusion, wrote Thomas within the majority opinion. “As a result of a ‘miscarriage’ contains any failure of mail to reach correctly, an individual experiences a miscarriage of mail when his mail is delivered to his neighbor, held on the submit workplace, or returned to the sender—no matter why it occurred,” he wrote. Equally, “[w]hen Congress enacted the FTCA, the ‘loss’ of mail ordinarily meant a deprivation of mail, no matter how the deprivation was led to.”

Thomas additionally briefly described the scope of the U.S. Postal Service’s work, noting that the postal exception was designed to make sure that the federal government wouldn’t face an infinite stream of lawsuits over inevitable mail-delivery points. “In 2024, the Postal Service’s greater than 600,000 workers delivered greater than 112 billion items of mail—over 300 million a day—to greater than 165 million supply factors. Unsurprisingly, given this quantity, not all mail arrives correctly and on time,” he wrote.

In her dissenting opinion, Sotomayor rejected the bulk’s interpretation of “loss” and “miscarriage,” contending that its “studying of the postal exception transforms, relatively than honors, the exception Congress enacted.” Congress might have made it clear that the postal exception was broad, Sotomayor wrote, however, as an alternative, it remoted particular types of misconduct: “loss,” miscarriage,” and “negligent transmission.” “Through the use of ‘specificity’ over ‘generality,’ it follows that Congress supposed for this exception” to be restricted in scope.

The bulk’s interpretation of “loss” and “miscarriage,” Sotomayor continued, is at odds with how these phrases are generally used. “Individuals lose their mail when it will get caught behind a drawer, not once they deliberately throw it away. … The identical is true when the Postal Service loses somebody’s mail. The reason being an error, not deliberate wrongdoing,” she wrote.

Sotomayor concluded by difficult the bulk’s characterization of what was at stake within the case. “Opposite to the bulk’s suggestion in any other case, adhering to the textual content Congress enacted wouldn’t flood the Authorities or courts with frivolous lawsuits.” And “even when ruling for Konan right now would imply extra fits in opposition to the Authorities for mail-related intentional torts tomorrow, that will not present this Courtroom with authority to alter the textual content Congress enacted.”