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Opinion of the Court
mate's signature). Just how requiring the end recipient to sign for a piece of mail substantially improves the reliability of the delivery procedures leading up to that person's receipt, Justice Ginsburg's dissent does not persuasively explain. Nor is there any probative evidence to this effect in the record.6
Even if one accepts that the BOP's current procedures improve delivery to some degree, our cases have never held that improvements in the reliability of new procedures necessarily demonstrate the infirmity of those that were replaced. Other areas of the law, moreover, have for strong policy reasons resisted rules crediting the notion that, " 'be-cause the world gets wiser as it gets older, therefore it was foolish before.' " Advisory Committee's Notes on Fed. Rule Evid. 407, 28 U. S. C. App., p. 864 (1994 ed.) (quoting Hart v. Lancashire & Yorkshire R. Co., 21 Law Times Rep. (n. s.) 261, 263 (1869), and explaining that Rule 407's prohibition against use of subsequent remedial measures to prove fault attempts to avoid discouraging persons from taking steps to further safety). In this case, we believe the same principle supports our conclusion that the Government ought not be penalized and told to "try harder," post, at 180, simply because the BOP has since upgraded its policies.
Here, the use of the mail addressed to petitioner at the penitentiary was clearly acceptable for much the same reason we have approved mailed notice in the past. Short of allowing the prisoner to go to the post office himself, the remaining portion of the delivery would necessarily depend on a system in effect within the prison itself relying on prison staff. We think the FBI's use of the system de-6 To try to show that there is a "significant risk," Brief for Petitioner 14, that notice mailed to a prison will not reach an inmate, petitioner has cited several cases from various Courts of Appeals involving postforfeiture challenges. As the Government argues, these cases, like petitioner's own suit here, involve only claims that notice was not received, not findings of nonreceipt.
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