CNN
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The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear the debate in a lawsuit against the U.S. Postal Service filed by a Texas woman who alleges that she refused to send emails to rental properties because her career is black.
Real estate agent and licensed insurance agent Lebene Konan allegedly said that the post office, which covers two rental properties owned in the suburbs of Dallas, changed the lock on the post office’s box and refused to deliver mail for two to three months.
Conan claimed that it happened because the career and the postmaster “didn’t like the idea that black people own them.”
The 1946 law generally allows people to sues the federal government for damages if an employee is injured or suffers a loss of property due to negligence. However, the law includes many exceptions, such as a claim for a hike from “loss of letters, miscarriage, or communication of negligence or negligence of postal materials.” The question of the High Court is, therefore, whether the exception applies to Conan’s situation.
The federal district court in Texas granted the government’s request to dismiss the case for exceptions. However, the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed its decision and proceeded with the lawsuit. The Biden administration appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in September, and the Trump administration continued to defend the lawsuit.
In the fiscal year ended 2023, the US Postal Service delivered more than 116 billion pieces of mail to more than 166 million delivery points nationwide, the government said. If the court accepts Conan’s position, the government said it could open USPS up to the flood of lawsuits.
“Under the logic of the Fifth Circuit’s decision, anyone who loses or erroneous mail could potentially file a federal tort lawsuit and proceed to a potentially burdensome finding, as long as USPS employees claimed they acted intentionally,” the government appealed to the High Court.
The Supreme Court is likely to hear the debate in the fall and make a decision next year.
Also on Monday, the court refused to consider the Court of Appeals’ ruling that found Minnesota’s ban on people under the age of 21 carrying handguns violated a second amendment.
This decision means that the ban remains blocked.
A three-judge panel in the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the unanimous decision that the 2003 law violated both the second and fourth amendments, deciding that the state could not legally prohibit individuals aged 18 to 20 from obtaining public carry permits.
Minnesota appealed the decision in January, arguing that the appeals court did not take into account the new Supreme Court decision from last year.
More than 30 states and the District of Columbia have similar regulations. Another Court of Appeals, the Fifth Circuit, ruled earlier this year that the law banning the sale of handguns between the ages of 18 and 20 was also unconstitutional.
The question of how far the government will go towards regulating guns for people under the age of 21 has been caught up in a broader debate about the history created by the Landmark 2022 decision from the Supreme Court that made it easier for Americans to carry guns in public. The decision required that the courts coincided with a second amendment before finding similar gun controls in history.
In the case of Minnesota law, the 8th Circuit ruled that there was no appropriate historical analogy for the state’s ban.
However, the subsequent Supreme Court decision last year seemed to change the analysis that lower courts must make when weighing the constitutionality of gun laws.
In that case, the Supreme Court upheld federal laws that prohibit people who are subject to domestic violence from holding gun ownership. The majority of justice stated that courts do not need to find the exact same regulations in historical records, but rather whether the new law is “similar in relation to” with the law that “our traditions are understood to be permitted.”
