A divided Supreme Court sided with the federal government on Tuesday in U.S. Postal Service v. Konan, a dispute over mishandled mail. Writing for a 5-4 majority, Justice Clarence 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.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, in which she argued that the majority opinion provided the U.S. Postal Service far more protection from lawsuits than Congress had intended to give it. “It is not the role of the Judiciary to supplant the choice Congress made because it would have chosen differently,” she wrote.
The case emerged from a conflict between a landlord and postal workers in Euless, Texas. The landlord, Lebene Konan, spent years fighting to have her mail and mail belonging to her tenants delivered to a shared mailbox, but postal workers regularly held it at the post office or returned it to the sender, contending that Konan had not met identification requirements for all addressees.
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