Your Mail Not Delivered on Purpose? SCOTUS Says You Can’t Sue

Welcome once again to Layto's Law. Here's Steve Layto.

I had a lot of people send me this story last week.

Just didn't get a chance to get to it.

But court holds that U.S. Postal Service can't be sued

over intentionally misdelivered mail.

And by court, we mean the Supreme Court.

So this means that if you found out that your mail carrier

simply decided not to deliver your mail to you and just decided

that and I'll return it all to send her and you found out

that you're doing that and you're doing it on purpose.

You can't sue them for that.

So there you go from scotusblog.com, Kelsey Dallas,

wrote this a divided Supreme Court,

cited with the federal government on Tuesday in U.S.

Postal Service versus Conean, a dispute over mishandled mail,

writing for a five four majorities.

This is a close call just as Thomas explained that a law

protecting the U.S. Postal Service from lawsuits over lost

or miscarried mail bars lawsuits over mail that was intentionally

misdelivered.

And so I have to remind you that oftentimes on appeal,

they're not arguing about facts anymore.

They'll actually say we'll assume these facts are true.

What result do we get?

So assume for the moment that the person who's saying their mail

is not being delivered intentionally is correct.

That is the case because the Supreme Court is saying,

even if that's true, she cannot win.

So just as Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Kagan,

Gorsuch and Jackson, in which she argued the majority opinion,

provided the U.S. Postal Service much more protection from lawsuits

and Congress had intended to give it.

It's not the role that judiciary to supplant the choice Congress made

because it would have chosen differently.

The case emerged from a conflict between a landlord and postal workers in Texas.

The landlord spent years fighting to have her mail and mail belonging to

a tenants delivered to a shared mailbox,

but postal workers regularly held it at the post office or simply returned it

to the sender, contending that she had not met identification requirements

for all the addresses.

Ultimately, she sued the Postal Service,

two postal workers and the federal government.

For among other things, intentional inflection of emotional distress,

business interference, arguing that she was a victim of racial discrimination

and the mail delivery drama had made it more difficult for her to find and keep tenants.

So if she tells the truth to a tenant, by the way,

you can stay here, but you might not get mail.

Some people aren't going to like that.

The Supreme Court case addressed only her claims against the Postal

Service and the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act,

which outlines the circumstances where the federal government can be sued for damages.

So again, remember that to sue the government,

you basically need their permission and assert things for which you can sue them

and certain things for which you cannot and the Federal Tort Claims Act outlines

the ways in which you can sue the federal government.

Specifically, the court was asked to resolve a disagreement between the different

federal courts over the scope of the FTC's postal exception,

which protects the government from suits arising out of the loss,

miscarriage or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.

Now, the disagreement between the different courts of appeals were talking about a split

in the circuits.

So there's different circuit courts that lead to the US Supreme Court.

Apparently, some circuit said, yes, you can sue for this and some said you cannot.

So the Supreme Court will often step in and say, okay, we've got a disagreement here.

We've got to make it to where all the circuits agree.

The government contended that the postal exception barred the claims here

because intentional non-delivery mail is a form of loss or miscarriage.

On the other hand, the plaintiff argued that the postal exception

doesn't cover intentional acts.

And remember, it talks about arising out of the loss,

miscarriage or negligent transmission of letters.

And it would sound like those are things that just happen by accident.

But that's not how the court sought in the majority.

The court sided with the government holding that an intentional failure to deliver the mail

falls within the postal exception on the FTCA.

The ordinary meanings of both miscarriage and loss point to the court

to that conclusion writes Thomas in the majority opinion because a miscarriage

includes any failure of mail to arrive properly.

A person experiences a miscarriage of mail when his mail is delivered to his neighbor,

held at the post office or returned to send her, regardless of why it happened,

he wrote, similarly, when Congress enacted the FTCA,

the loss of mail ordinarily meant a deprivation of mail,

regardless of what brought it about.

He also briefly described the scope of the U.S. Postal Service's work,

noting that the postal exceptions were designed to ensure that the government

would not face an endless stream of lawsuits over mail delivery issues.

In 2024, the postal service is more than 600,000 employees delivered more than

112 billion pieces of mail, over 300 million a day to more than 165 million

delivery points, unsurprisingly, not all mail arrives properly and on time.

And of course, he's missing the point.

No one saying that they should be sued for stuff that gets misdelivered.

They're saying that he should be allowed to sue for stuff where they intentionally

don't deliver it.

And there's a huge distinction.

I mean, those numbers are impressive, but no one saying that there's hundreds

of millions of pieces of mail being intentionally misdelivered.

Inter dissenting opinions so to my or rejected the interpretation of the majority

of loss and miscarriage,

contending that it is reading of the postal exception transform,

contending that it's reading of the postal exception transforms rather than

honors the exception that Congress enacted.

Congress could have made it clear that the postal exception was broad,

but instead it isolated specific forms of misconduct,

loss, miscarriage, and negligent transmission.

By using specificity over generality,

it follows that Congress intended for the exception to be limited in scope.

The majority's interpretation of loss and miscarriage she continued is

at odds with how those terms are commonly used.

People lose their mail when it gets stuck behind a drawer,

now and intentionally throw it away.

The same is true in the postal service loses someone's mail.

The reason is an error, not deliberate wrongdoing.

So to my or concluded by challenging the majority's characterization of what

was at stake in the case, contrary to the majority's suggestion,

otherwise adhering to the text Congress enacted would not flood the government

or courts with frivolous lawsuits.

And even if ruling for the plaintiff today would mean more suits against the

government for mail-related intentional torts tomorrow that would not provide

this court with authority to change the text Congress enacted.

So it really does boil down to how you read that sentence that says that

the government's protective lawsuits are rising out of the loss,

miscarriage or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.

And the question is, if they purposely don't deliver it, is that loss?

And Thomas says, yeah, that's a loss.

But is it what they meant by the word loss in that phrase?

And it sounds to me more like the matter of something doesn't show up and nobody

knows why that's a loss.

And they could have very easily said,

a rising out of the loss, miscarriage, negligent transmission or intentional

transmission failure, but they didn't put that in there.

So obviously it's a five, four opinion.

It's very, very close.

All it takes is one vote to go the other way and boom, there they go.

But, but obviously Congress could fix this.

And this is a great example where if you take something to the US Supreme Court

and you get there and it took you years to get there and you finally get there

and you lose by one vote.

Well, there's no place else you can go legally, but what you could do is go to

Congress and go, hey, is there any chance we can get a little update to the Federal

Tork claims act where it talks about mail and the US Postal Service and put in

there that you can sue them for intentional, non-delivery of mail.

And I don't know how often that clamorizes.

And in fact, I was thinking about this and having been an attorney now for well

over 30 years.

I don't recall ever hearing a case where somebody says my mail carrier or my

post office refuses to deliver my mail.

Now, I've heard of issues before where people say they keep delivering my

mail next door.

I've heard of stuff that gets, you know, misdelivered.

And it actually nowadays because it's all these different services that are

delivering stuff, you know, FedEx, UPS, Amazon Prime.

And I've had stuff where they said, you know, your thing was delivered.

Here's a photograph of it.

And I look at it and it's on someone else's porch.

And I had that happen just a month or two ago where something was delivered

and I'm looking going, I don't recognize that porch.

And I contacted the sender and I go, that's not me.

I don't know where it is.

And now in that case, they sent me another one.

But who knows what happened to the first one?

And the postal service, I'm still a big fan.

I really am.

And one of the reasons is is that if you still think about this, you put a

first class stamp on an envelope in Key West, Florida.

And it will get to its destination in Alaska.

And think about the cost of that first class stamp versus where that letter went.

You know, and that's pretty impressive.

But also I have a PO box that's in the credits of every video I put up now for

the last five or six years.

And the PO box is in a small town atlas Michigan, atlas Michigan.

And Atlas actually has in essence two entities in it.

The post office and there's a little shop next to the post office.

It sells tools.

That's it.

That's it in a couple of little houses and a little intersection and there

used to be a little mill, a little milk is a pond there.

And atlas and I go in there and I've been going in there for years.

And that's where I tell people to send correspondence to lay toes law.

It's also where people send me shirts and double XL.

And I've gotten to know the various people who've worked there over the years.

And they have always been extremely nice, extremely helpful.

And you might say, but Steve, you know, come on, how much work do you provide them?

Oh, when I sell books on more than one occasion,

I've walked in with more than a hundred things that need to be mailed more than a hundred.

And there was a time when my book, American Murder Houses came out and I had some

books and I said, Hey, anybody want a book?

Let me know and I'll invoice you and I'll sign it mail it to you.

And in one weekend, I sold 900 books.

Now, it created a ton of work for me because I had to do all the paperwork to get

the invoices and all that.

And then I had to sign the books and package the books up.

And then I would walk into the atlas post office with boxes and boxes and boxes of

books. And if there's nobody else in there, I just start piling them up and the

guys start doing them.

But there's only one person and only one, you know, cash register.

And so if somebody else came in, he'd pause it and get them in.

But what's funny is I have to be the highest volume person in that post office.

And like I said, I've had nothing but fabulous service there.

And I've had nothing but fabulous service my entire life with the post office.

It's usually the other people misdelivering things or running over my fence posts or things

like that. So we'll see what happens here.

I don't imagine that this is a huge problem, but as you might think someone might

hear this and go, oh, that one customer I don't like, I can stop delivering their stuff.

But, but I'm going to tell you right now, I assure you that there are rules within the

post office where a letter carrier or mail handler can get in trouble for not doing

their job. So there is a remedy there.

It's a question of whether it gets enforced.

So everybody sent that.

Thank you very much from scotusblog.com.

Kelsey Dallas wrote that, cord holds that US Postal Service can't be sued over the

intentionally misdelivered mail.

And that was the US Supreme Court.

Question to your comments, put them below, let's talk to you later.

Bye bye.

Thank you for watching.

Latos law.

One advantage of talking to yourself is that you know at least somebody's listening.