Postal Service v. Konan

Case background

Lebene Konan owns two rental houses a block apart in Euless, Texas, and leases rooms to tenants in both. Beginning in 2020, Konan’s mail carrier repeatedly stopped delivering mail to her properties: changing the listed owner of one house to a tenant’s name, returning mail addressed to Konan and her tenants to senders as undeliverable, and refusing to release held mail without identification for the addressees. Konan’s administrative complaints went nowhere, so in 2022 she sued the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act, bringing state-law claims for nuisance, tortious interference, conversion, and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The District Court dismissed her complaint under the FTCA’s postal exception, which retains sovereign immunity for claims “arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission” of mail. The Fifth Circuit reversed, holding that the exception’s terms do not cover the intentional act of not delivering mail at all — a ruling that conflicted with the First and Second Circuits, which had read the exception to cover intentional misconduct as well.

Questions Presented

(1) Whether a plaintiff’s claim that she and her tenants did not receive mail because Postal Service employees intentionally did not deliver it to a designated address arises out of “the loss” or “miscarriage” of letters or postal matter under 28 U.S.C. § 2680(b).

Holding

The United States retains sovereign immunity for claims arising out of the intentional nondelivery of mail, because both “miscarriage” and “loss” of mail under the FTCA’s postal exception can occur as a result of the Postal Service’s intentional failure to deliver the mail. When Congress enacted the FTCA in 1946, both terms ordinarily encompassed failures of mail to arrive caused by intentional misconduct, not merely negligence, and nothing in the statute’s text or structure limits either term to unintentional conduct. The Fifth Circuit’s judgment is vacated and the case remanded for further proceedings.

The Court

Justice Thomas delivered the opinion of the Court, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. Justice Sotomayor filed a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Kagan, Gorsuch, and Jackson.

What this episode contains

This episode is an AI-narrated reading of the majority opinion in Postal Service v. Konan, written by Justice Thomas.

AI disclosure: The voice in this episode is AI-generated, using a machine learning model styled to loosely resemble the authoring justice. Tone, inflection, pacing, and emphasis are artifacts of the model and should not be attributed to Justice Thomas. The text being read is the Court’s published majority opinion, lightly adapted to improve readability for the spoken format.