Why is the U.S. Postal Service typically immune from lawsuits when it loses mail?
Under a legal principle called sovereign immunity, you generally cannot sue the government or its agencies. However, a law called the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA) carves out a major exception, allowing citizens to sue the government for harms caused by the wrongful or negligent acts of federal employees. For instance, if a mail truck negligently hits your car, the FTCA allows you to sue for damages.
However, the FTCA itself has its own exceptions—specific government activities that are shielded from lawsuits. One of these is the "postal exception," which states that the government cannot be sued for any claim "arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission" of letters or postal matter. Congress created this shield to protect the massive and essential function of mail delivery from being overwhelmed by constant litigation over the millions of items that inevitably get delayed or go missing every year.
The central conflict in a recent Supreme Court case is whether this immunity for "loss" and "miscarriage" protects the USPS only from accidental errors, or if it also shields the agency from lawsuits when employees are accused of intentionally destroying, stealing, or withholding mail as part of a targeted harassment campaign.
Can the U.S. Postal Service be sued if a mail carrier intentionally steals or destroys a package, or does federal law only allow lawsuits for accidental delivery errors?
This is the central question the Supreme Court considered in a case brought by a landlord who alleged postal workers intentionally refused to deliver her mail. The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) argued that a federal law immunizing it from suits over the "loss" or "miscarriage" of mail covers any failure of mail to arrive, regardless of the reason.
The government's position is that words like "loss" and "miscarriage" should be read broadly. They argue that if a mail carrier steals your package, you have still "lost" it in the legal sense of being deprived of your property. They contend Congress intended to create a broad shield to prevent the courts from getting bogged down in messy, hard-to-prove cases about why a specific letter was late. Without this protection, the USPS warns that anyone with a delayed package could file a lawsuit simply by claiming the failure was intentional.
The landlord, Ms. Konan, argued that "loss" and "miscarriage" in this context clearly refer to accidents and mistakes, not deliberate misconduct. Her attorney claimed that if a postal worker intentionally withholds your mail, he hasn't "lost" it any more than a car thief has "lost" your car. During arguments, Chief Justice Roberts echoed this common-sense view, stating, "If I say I 'lost my car,' people don't think somebody stole it. They think I forgot where I parked." The Court's decision will determine whether citizens have any financial recourse against the USPS itself for intentional sabotage by its employees.
A federal law shields the Postal Service from lawsuits over "loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission" of mail. How does the specific mention of "negligent" acts affect how judges interpret the words "loss" and "miscarriage"?
The inclusion of the phrase "negligent transmission" is a critical point of contention in interpreting the scope of the Postal Service's immunity. A landlord suing the USPS argued that the words in this list should be read together, following a legal principle that "a word is known by the company it keeps." Since "negligent transmission" clearly refers to carelessness or accidents, she argued that the accompanying words "loss" and "miscarriage" must also refer to unintentional errors.
Several justices found this argument persuasive. Justice Kagan noted, "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 Gorsuch raised a related textual issue, arguing that if the government is right that "loss" covers any failure of mail to arrive for any reason (including negligence), then Congress's decision to separately list "negligent transmission" becomes pointless and redundant. This violates a principle that judges should assume every word in a statute was included for a reason.
The government countered that Congress was simply being thorough, using a "belt-and-suspenders" approach with overlapping terms to ensure the broadest possible protection for mail delivery operations. In their view, the list was meant to cover all types of delivery failures, whether accidental or intentional. This debate highlights a fundamental challenge in reading laws: whether to interpret words in their broadest possible sense or to narrow their meaning based on the surrounding text.
If people could sue the Postal Service by claiming a late package was delivered maliciously, would that open the door to an unmanageable number of lawsuits?
The U.S. Postal Service argued that this is precisely the danger. Its main defense for a broad interpretation of its legal immunity is a practical one: preventing a "floodgate" of litigation that could disrupt its operations. The government warned the Supreme Court that if the shield against lawsuits only covers accidental mail loss, then any person with a late or missing delivery could get into court simply by alleging that the failure was intentional.
This would force the Postal Service to defend itself in countless cases, pulling postal workers off their routes to participate in depositions and trials. The government contends that Congress, when writing the law in 1946, made a deliberate choice to avoid this scenario. The goal was to shield the core function of mail delivery from the cost and distraction of litigation, leaving remedies for misconduct to internal discipline or criminal prosecution of rogue employees rather than private lawsuits against the agency.
Justice Alito expressed sympathy for this concern during oral arguments. He posed a hypothetical: "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 question captures the core of the government's fear—that a narrow ruling would create a simple playbook for plaintiffs to bypass the immunity Congress intended to provide for routine delivery failures, ultimately burdening a vital public service.
If the Postal Service is immune from lawsuits for intentional mail destruction, could that immunity protect a postal worker who deliberately throws away mail-in ballots?
This high-stakes question was raised during Supreme Court arguments to test the limits of the government's position. Justice Sotomayor asked the Postal Service's lawyer to consider a scenario where a postal worker intentionally refuses to deliver ballots from a specific county due to its political leanings or selectively postmarks them to invalidate votes. She asked if such an act would be considered a "miscarriage" of mail, thereby shielding the USPS from a lawsuit.
The government's argument suggests that it would. If "miscarriage" is interpreted broadly to mean any failure of mail to reach its destination correctly and on time, then even intentional, politically motivated election interference would fall under that definition. This would mean that while the individual employee could be criminally prosecuted, citizens or groups harmed by the act could not sue the USPS itself for damages or to force changes in its procedures.
This hypothetical dramatically raised the stakes of the case, moving it from a dispute about one person's mail delivery to a question with potential implications for the integrity of elections. It forced the justices to confront the most alarming consequences of a broad ruling in favor of the government. Justice Jackson highlighted the core tension, stating it was hard to believe that a law meant to hold the government accountable for wrongful acts would specifically immunize "the classic scenario of intentional mail destruction."
If a postal worker uses the mail to inflict emotional harm, like by maliciously returning a mother's letters to her son in the military stamped "Deceased," could the victim sue?
This disturbing hypothetical, posed by Justice Jackson, was designed to probe the outer boundaries of the Postal Service's claimed immunity. The question is whether the legal shield for claims "arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission" of mail is so broad that it would block a lawsuit for a separate and severe tort, like intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED), simply because mail was the instrument used to cause the harm.
The landlord suing the USPS argued that her claim was not about a simple delivery failure, but about a campaign of harassment where the mail was weaponized. Similarly, in Justice Jackson's hypothetical, the mother's primary injury is not the failure of the letters to arrive; it is the extreme emotional pain caused by the postal worker's malicious act. The argument is that such a claim does not truly "arise out of" a mail miscarriage but rather arises from the independent wrongful conduct.
The government's lawyer appeared to recognize the troubling implications of this scenario. When pressed for a direct answer on whether the IIED lawsuit would be barred, the attorney for the USPS strategically avoided a direct 'yes' or 'no.' He responded, "We think this is an issue that can be left on remand... We're not asking the Court to decide that." This reluctance to defend the harshest application of its own theory suggested even the government was uncomfortable with an interpretation that could lead to such a profoundly unjust result, where a citizen is left with no legal recourse for an intentional and cruel act by a government employee.