Almost every serious deadline in Minnesota law begins with an envelope.
A foreclosure notice. A tax-forfeiture surplus claim form. A summons served by mail. A credit bureau’s response to a dispute. A notice of a hearing. In each case the law does not ask whether you read it. It asks whether it was sent.
On February 24, 2026, the Supreme Court held 5–4 that if the Postal Service fails to deliver that envelope — even deliberately — the United States cannot be sued for it.
What Konan decided
Lebene Konan owned two rental properties in Euless, Texas. Her allegation was not that the mail got lost. It was that postal employees intentionally withheld her mail, changed mailbox ownership without her consent, returned her mail as undeliverable, and refused to release mail being held. Her rental business suffered. She sued the United States under the Federal Tort Claims Act for nuisance, tortious interference, conversion, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
The FTCA is the statute by which the United States waives sovereign immunity for certain torts. But the waiver has exceptions, and one of them — 28 U.S.C. § 2680(b), the “postal exception” — preserves immunity for any claim “arising out of the loss, miscarriage, or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.”
Konan’s argument was structural and, to a lot of readers, intuitive: Congress wrote “negligent transmission.” The presence of that adjective signals that the exception covers carelessness, not deliberate misconduct. Nobody “negligently” refuses to deliver mail out of spite.
Justice Thomas, writing for the majority, rejected it. The reasoning:
- “Miscarriage,” as ordinarily understood when the FTCA was enacted in 1946, meant any failure of mail to arrive at its intended destination — regardless of intent. Contemporary usage covered stolen and burned mail.
- “Loss” meant a deprivation of mail regardless of how the deprivation came about. One can be deprived by another person’s intentional act.
- “Negligent” modifies only “transmission.” Congress placed the adjective before the last item in the list, and an adjective attached to the final noun in a series cannot be transplanted backward onto the earlier ones.
Justice Sotomayor dissented, joined by Justices Kagan, Gorsuch, and Jackson. Her core objection was that “no one intentionally loses something,” that the majority’s reading makes “negligent transmission” largely superfluous, and that the FTCA’s other safeguards — the scope-of-employment requirement, the intentional-tort exception — already screen out the frivolous claims the majority worried about.
The judgment was vacated and remanded.
The Minnesota problem this creates
Minnesota does not merely use the mail. Minnesota law repeatedly makes mailing itself the legal event. A few examples, each verified against the primary source:
Foreclosure by advertisement. Under Minn. Stat. § 580.03, “[s]ix weeks’ published notice shall be given that such mortgage will be foreclosed by sale,” and “at least four weeks before the appointed time of sale a copy of such notice shall be served in like manner as a summons in a civil action in the district court upon the person in possession of the mortgaged premises, if the same are actually occupied.”
Tax-forfeiture surplus claims. Following Tyler v. Hennepin County, the Legislature built a claims procedure into Minn. Stat. § 282.005. The county auditor mails a notice and claim form, and the claim must be filed within six months from the date the notice is first mailed — not from the date you opened it. We wrote about that clock here.
Response deadlines in litigation. Minn. R. Civ. P. 6.01(e) provides that when a document is served by United States Mail, “3 days shall be added to the prescribed period.” Three days. That is the entire cushion Minnesota gives you for the postal system. (Practitioners who learned this as Rule 6.05 should note that rule was abrogated effective January 1, 2020 and its text folded into 6.01(e).)
Now put Konan next to that list. Minnesota law assumes the mail works. Federal law now confirms that when it does not work — through carelessness or through something worse — the entity responsible is immune from a damages suit.
The loss does not disappear. It lands on the person who was supposed to receive the envelope.
What still works
Konan closed one door. It did not close all of them, and the distinction matters enormously.
The FTCA claim against the Postal Service is barred. That is the holding. A suit for damages against the United States arising from nondelivery is not going to survive § 2680(b), whether the nondelivery was negligent or intentional.
The consequences of nondelivery are a separate question. Whether a deadline should be enforced against someone who genuinely never received notice is not governed by the FTCA at all. It is governed by the statute or rule that created the deadline, by due process, and in Minnesota by doctrines like excusable neglect under Rule 60.02(a) and the relief available to a defendant not actually personally notified. Losing the right to sue the mail carrier is not the same as losing the argument that a clock should not have run.
Non-suit remedies remain. Complaints to the Postal Service, referrals to the Postal Inspection Service (mail theft and obstruction of correspondence are federal crimes), and Postal Regulatory Commission processes are unaffected by a decision about tort damages.
The practical version
For anyone in Minnesota whose legal position depends on receiving mail — which is nearly everyone with a mortgage, a tax bill, a lawsuit, or a credit report:
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Keep addresses of record current everywhere separately. The county, the recorder, the mortgage servicer, the court, and each credit bureau maintain their own address. Updating one updates none of the others. Mail forwarding expires.
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Use a method that generates a record for anything with a clock on it. Certified mail, return receipt, tracking, and — for outbound disputes and demands — a retained copy with the tracking number attached to it. After Konan, your proof is worth more than your grievance.
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Turn on the free tools. USPS Informed Delivery emails a daily scan of incoming mail. It is imperfect, but it converts “I never got it” from an assertion into something with a paper trail behind it.
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Treat a gap in expected mail as urgent, not annoying. If a bill you always get stops arriving, or a bureau never responds to a dispute, the meaningful risk is usually not the missing document. It is the deadline attached to the document you did not know existed.
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If you discover a deadline that already ran, the timing of your response is the case. The argument that you lacked actual notice is strongest when it is made immediately upon discovery.
A closing thought
There is a certain grim symmetry in this decision. The FTCA’s postal exception is one of the oldest carve-outs in the statute, written in 1946 for a Post Office Department that handled a nation’s correspondence and could not possibly answer in tort for every misdirected letter. That rationale is not crazy.
But the world it was written for did not use mailing as a substitute for actual notice the way modern statutes do. Six weeks of published notice and a mailed form now stand in for telling someone that their house is being sold or that their equity is about to revert to the county.
The Court has held that the system carrying those notices owes no damages when it fails. Which means the burden of making sure the envelope arrives has quietly shifted to the person with the most to lose if it does not.
If a deadline passed on a notice you never received — a foreclosure, a tax forfeiture, a lawsuit, or a credit dispute — the strength of the response depends heavily on how quickly it is made after you find out. Send us a message or call 612-470-6529.
Sources: United States Postal Service v. Konan, 607 U. S. ___ (2026) (Thomas, J.), No. 24–351, argued October 8, 2025, decided February 24, 2026 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting, joined by Kagan, Gorsuch, and Jackson, JJ.), vacating and remanding 96 F.4th 799; 28 U.S.C. § 2680(b); Minn. Stat. § 580.03; Minn. Stat. § 282.005; Minn. R. Civ. P. 6.01(e) and 60.02 (Rule 6.05 abrogated effective January 1, 2020) (Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes). This article is general commentary on a published decision, federal statutes, and Minnesota law — not legal advice — and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship. Whether any particular deadline can be reopened depends entirely on the facts. No outcome is promised or implied.