On August 25, 2001, Barbara Dolan fell over letters, packages and periodicals placed on her porch by an employee of the United States Postal Service, suffering serious injury.

[4] The Supreme Court reversed the Third Circuit, ruling 7-1[5] that the postal exception under the FTCA did not include all negligence that occurred in the course of mail delivery.

Instead, context and precedent required the exception to be limited to negligence that caused mail to be lost or to arrive late, in damaged condition, or at the wrong address.

However, the complete statutory context and purpose behind a provision informs whether a word extends "to the outer limits of its definitional possibilities."

The Court also did not believe that the general rule applied that the government's waiver of immunity should be strictly interpreted in its favor.

The Court considered this rule "unhelpful" in the FTCA context, because "unduly generous interpretations of the exceptions" would defeat the statute's central and sweeping purpose of waiving the government's immunity.

Justice Thomas argued that the Court had failed to give the text of the postal exception its ordinary meaning.

Thomas considered that the discussion in Kosak at most established that the postal exception did not apply to auto accidents; that decision accordingly said nothing about "slip and fall" claims.