Digest
When a landlord alleged that postal workers intentionally refused to deliver her mail as part of a harassment campaign, she ran into a federal law that generally shields the U.S. Postal Service from lawsuits over lost mail. The Supreme Court is now deciding whether that shield, which covers claims arising from the "loss" or "miscarriage" of mail, protects the USPS only from accidental mistakes or if it also immunizes it from lawsuits over intentional, malicious acts by its employees.
The government argued that the terms "loss" and "miscarriage" broadly cover any failure of mail to arrive, warning that a narrow reading would invite a flood of lawsuits from anyone who could simply allege their late package was intentional. The landlord’s attorney countered that the law’s language points to accidents, not deliberate misconduct, and that the government's view would mean a postal worker could intentionally destroy a rent check or mail-in ballot with no legal recourse for the victim. The Court's decision will determine whether citizens can hold the Postal Service financially accountable for deliberate wrongdoing or if such claims are barred to protect the agency from potentially burdensome litigation.
Key Moments
If I say I 'lost my car,' people don't think somebody stole it. They think I forgot where I parked. If someone said they 'lost the mail,' I wouldn't think right away that somebody stole it.
This simple analogy powerfully challenges the government's core argument. It shows that the Chief Justice believes the ordinary, everyday meaning of 'loss' does not include intentional, malicious acts, signaling a preference for a narrower, more intuitive reading of the law.
The words here are known by the company they keep. You have 'loss' on one side and 'negligent transmission' on the other. It seems most natural to read them all as referring to mistakes, not intentional acts.
Justice Kagan is explaining a key tool of statutory interpretation ('noscitur a sociis'). By framing the words as a related group, she argues that the explicit inclusion of 'negligent' taints the words around it, making it hard to believe 'loss' and 'miscarriage' were meant to cover intentional wrongdoing.
If 'loss' covers everything, including negligent acts, then why did Congress bother writing 'negligent transmission'? Your reading of the statute creates a lot of surplusage.
This is a classic textualist attack. Justice Gorsuch is pointing out that the government's interpretation violates a core principle of reading laws: that every word is there for a reason. If the government is right, Congress wrote redundant words, which judges are very reluctant to assume.
It's hard to get one's mind around the idea that in a law authorizing lawsuits for torts, Congress meant to take the classic scenario of intentional mail destruction off the table. It just doesn't seem to make sense.
This question goes to the fundamental purpose of the law. Justice Jackson finds the government's position illogical. Why would Congress go to the trouble of allowing citizens to sue the government for wrongdoing, but then carve out an exception for what is arguably some of the worst, most deliberate wrongdoing?
What if a postal worker refuses to deliver mail-in ballots from a specific county because of its political views, or selectively postmarks ballots to favor one side on Election Day? Isn't that a 'miscarriage'?
This hypothetical dramatically raises the stakes. Justice Sotomayor is forcing the government to confront the most extreme implications of its argument: that its reading could shield employees who intentionally interfere with elections, transforming a case about mail delivery into one about the integrity of democracy.
So if I don't get my Christmas cards on time, I can't sue for negligence. But if I just say the delivery person doesn't like me and did it intentionally, then I'm in court? This seems to open the door to too many lawsuits.
This reveals Justice Alito's sympathy for the government's 'floodgates' argument. He sees the practical danger that allowing claims for intentional acts will just encourage plaintiffs to re-label every late delivery as malicious, thereby gutting the immunity Congress clearly intended to provide for routine errors.
Imagine a postal employee maliciously stamps 'Deceased' on letters a mother sends to her son in the military and returns them. Can she sue for intentional infliction of emotional distress, or is that barred because it 'arises out of' the mail?
This hypothetical tests the boundary of the exception. Justice Jackson is probing whether the government's immunity is so broad that it would block a lawsuit for a completely separate and horrific tort (IIED) simply because the mail was the weapon used to inflict the harm. It highlights the potential for profoundly unjust results.
When asked if his theory would block the IIED claim in Justice Jackson's hypothetical, the government's lawyer responded, 'We think this is an issue that can be left on remand... We're not asking the Court to decide that.'
This is a strategic pivot that reveals a weakness. By avoiding a direct answer to a tough hypothetical, the attorney signals that the government is uncomfortable with the extreme implications of its own argument and would rather the Court set a broad rule without grappling with its harshest applications.
Arguments
Petitioner
The petitioner argues that the United States Postal Service cannot be sued in this case because of a specific rule called the "postal exception." To understand this, you first need to know that normally, you can't sue the government—this is a concept called sovereign immunity. However, a law called the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) waives this immunity, allowing people to sue the government for certain harms caused by federal employees, like if a mail truck negligently hits your car. But the FTCA has its own exceptions, which are like "no-sue zones" for specific government activities. The postal exception is one of these zones, stating that the government cannot be sued for claims "arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission" of mail. The entire case hinges on what those words, especially "loss" and "miscarriage," mean.
The Postal Service's core argument is that these words should be understood by their broad, ordinary meaning from 1946, when the law was written. They argue that a "loss" of mail isn't just about an accidental misplacement, like losing your keys. In a legal sense, it means being deprived of your property for any reason, including intentional theft. If a mail carrier steals your package, you have still "lost" it. Similarly, they argue "miscarriage" was a common postal term for any failure of mail to reach its destination correctly and on time. It didn't matter why it failed—whether it fell off a truck, was sent to the wrong city by mistake, or was intentionally thrown in a dumpster by a rogue employee. In all those scenarios, the mail "miscarried." Therefore, the petitioner contends that Ms. Konan's claim that an employee intentionally refused to deliver her mail is a textbook example of a "loss" and a "miscarriage."
This interpretation, the petitioner claims, reflects a practical choice made by Congress. By using multiple, overlapping terms like "loss," "miscarriage," and "negligent transmission," Congress was taking a "belt-and-suspenders" approach to completely shield the core function of mail delivery from lawsuits. The goal was to prevent the courts from getting bogged down in messy, hard-to-prove cases about why a letter was late or missing. If people could sue simply by alleging that a mail carrier intentionally failed to deliver their mail, it would open the floodgates. Anyone with a late Christmas card or a missing magazine could file a lawsuit, claiming the carrier had a personal grudge.
Ultimately, the petitioner argues that allowing this lawsuit would force the Postal Service to spend enormous time and money defending itself in court, pulling postal workers off their routes to become witnesses. Congress wanted to avoid this disruption to a vital national service. It decided that the public was better served by a system that handles these issues through internal discipline or criminal charges against bad employees, rather than allowing millions of potential private lawsuits over delivery failures. The price for this broad protection is that even in a case involving alleged intentional misconduct like Ms. Konan's, the courthouse doors remain closed for a suit against the USPS itself.
Respondent
The respondent argues that the government is stretching the words "loss" and "miscarriage" beyond their common-sense meanings to escape responsibility for intentional wrongdoing. The whole case hinges on a law called the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA), which is the main rule that allows citizens to sue the U.S. government for harm caused by its employees. However, the law has exceptions. The "postal exception" says you cannot sue the government for claims arising from the "loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission" of mail. The respondent’s central point is that these words describe accidents and mistakes, not deliberate, malicious acts. She argues that if a postal worker intentionally withholds your mail as part of a harassment campaign, he hasn't "lost" it any more than a car thief has "lost" your car. It's a targeted, wrongful act, which is exactly the kind of thing the FTCA was created to address.
To support this, the respondent points to the other words in the exception itself. The rule protects the post office from lawsuits over "loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission." The last phrase, "negligent transmission," explicitly refers to carelessness. Legal experts have a principle that "a word is known by the company it keeps." The respondent argues that since "loss" and "miscarriage" are listed right next to a term for negligence, they should be understood in a similar way—as referring to unintentional errors. It would be bizarre for Congress to create a list that means "accidents, mistakes, or any kind of failure whatsoever." Instead, it’s a list of three related types of blunders, all shielding the USPS from lawsuits over the everyday, unavoidable mistakes that happen when handling billions of pieces of mail.
Finally, the respondent argues that the government's interpretation would lead to an absurd result that Congress never intended. If "miscarriage" means any failure of mail to arrive for any reason, then the other two terms in the exception—"loss" and "negligent transmission"—become completely redundant and meaningless. Why would Congress list three things if one of them already covered everything? More importantly, the entire purpose of the FTCA was to make the government accountable for the wrongful acts of its employees. The respondent claims it makes no sense that Congress would create this system of accountability but then create a special, hidden immunity for postal workers who intentionally use their power to steal, destroy, or withhold mail to harm citizens. This case, she argues, is not about a simple delivery error; it's about whether there is any legal path to justice when a government employee weaponizes the mail system itself.