This case of a person wanting to sue the post office
Apparently a law has the Postal Service exempt from such lawsuits. However, the first amendment guarantees the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. What is the argument that the first amendment does not apply to this particular post office exemption?
The government has “sovereign immunity.” Basically, you cannot sue them unless they let you sue them (and some other specific circumstances). Weird, I know, and maybe a bit weirder with the Post Office which is kinda-sorta but not quite the government.
The post office is exempt from lawsuits regarding “loss, miscarriage or negligent transmission of letters or postal matter.” The government does have sovereign immunity , which bascially means you can only sue when the governemtn has essentially given permission. In this case, there’s a law that says you can sue if a federal employee causes harm to you - for example, the mail carrier crashes their vehicle into your car. There’s an exception for harm caused by negligence in delivering mail and the case before the Supreme Court is about whether the exemption applies when the mail is intentionally not delivered.
The idea was that the “sovereign” back in the day, was the authority from which the law flowed, so it didn’t make sense that courts and laws they set up for their subjects could actually sue or bind them.
In modern usage, it’s more of a check against legal remedies for political actions than anything else. In other words, if you don’t like what your city/state/Federal government did in some legitimate political way, you can’t sue them for it.
Of course, it’s misused all over the place. Abusive cops have long hid behind it- as agents of the state, they are under the sovereign immunity umbrella. Same with garden variety screw-ups- the water department makes a mistake and floods your house? You’re SOL unless they agree to be sued for damages.
This Postal Service suit sounds a lot like one of those edge cases where the merit may come out in the actual suit itself. On one hand, a lot of people have unrealistic expectations of any and all customer-facing organizations, but on the other, the Postal Service can be notoriously bad, and we’ve got no recourse.
That isn’t interpreted as allowing you to sue the government. It means you can write your local representative.
well that’s pretty weak. Though the wikipedia article indicates the right to sue is part of it.
As noted by others, the government has sovereign immunity; you can only sue when they authorize it.
So, no, you don’t have a constitutional right to sue the government.
In fact, the 11th amendment extends the immunity afforded the states.
What the article you link to does is give examples of justices saying "the right of access to the courts is an aspect of the First Amendment right to petition the Government for redress of grievances.” Note that such access in general is not saying there is inherently a right to sue the government itself. Nor does he give any examples of someone using that right to win a case. Most of his actual examples show courts finding other ways to address the subject, avoiding any first amendment issues.
Oddly, the one example of an actual suit involving a government was Missouri v NOW, “in which Missouri claimed economic damage from a National Organization for Women boycott to induce states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. The court held NOW’s activities to be political, a form of petition that was thereby immune from Missouri’s effort to stop them.”
IOW, The public does have the right to defend itself from a government suit, which is nice to hear.
What it all boils down to is that sovereign immunity is the governing law in almost all cases.
The concept of sovereign immunity is fairly simple - you cannot sue the government, or a civil servant, for doing what their job requires them / allows them to do. You can’t sue the judge because he convicted you, or because he refused to allow your “Exhibit A” to be shown in court.
You can’t sue a policeman for doing his job. Sometimes, that job requires quick decisions in stressful circumstances, so you can’t sue them either if they honestly thought they were doing something they were allowed to do. In recent Supreme decisions, this has devolved to sovereign immunity applies unless the plaintiff can show the police must have known they were in the wrong; and the criteria SCOTUS picked was that the plaintiff had to point to a precedent almost exactly the same situation - meaning anything not already decided as egregious excess by the courts before that, is no longer considered a situation the aggrieved party can sue over.
>The judges disagreed with the lower court’s determination that Konan’s claims were precluded because they arose out of a “loss” or a “miscarriage.” Rather, the judges said Konan’s case doesn’t fall into one of those “limited situations” because it involved the intentional act of not delivering the mail.
So actually she can sue, but not the individual employees. She won on appeal, but the Post Office is appealing to SCOTUS. It all hinges I guess on what is “miscarriage” and whether that includes intentional. Plus there’s an allegation of racial discrimination, which brings constitutional rights and the Civil Rights act into play.
That’s not accurate, at least not in the US and probably not anywhere. You can only sue in circumstances where the sovereign allows it. For example, the Federal Tort Claims Act allows people to sue the US government directly when a government employee acts negligently or wrongfully. In the absence of that law, one could not sue the Federal government for an employee’s negligent act. That law has an exception for postal employees’ negligent acts regarding mail delivery.
There’s a related concept that confuses things a little which is indemnification. That means if a government employee is sued, there are certain conditions under which the government will provide a defense and pay any damages- but the suit against the employee, not the government. That’s why Roe v Wade is not Roe v Texas or Roe v Dallas County. That’s why every time I was sued as a government employee, the state attorney general’s office defended me and when the case was settled, the state comptroller’s office paid the settlement. One of the normal conditions for indemnification is that the employee must be acting within the scope of their employment and it must not be an intentional wrongdoing.
I have not been able to figure out why her claims against the individual employees were dismissed but it’s possibly because she can’t make a FTCA claim against individual employees.
Sovereign Immunity protects the government entity or agency.
Qualified Immunity protects the government employee.
But if I egregiously violated someone’s civil liberties or act in such a way that is outrageously and unjustifiably reckless, I can in fact be sued, and prosecuted.