Cite as: 528 U. S. 549 (2000)
Opinion of the Court
ability to investigate the cause of his injuries is no more impaired by his ignorance of the underlying RICO pattern than a malpractice plaintiff is thwarted by ignorance of the details of treatment decisions or of prevailing standards of medical practice.
Nor does Rotella's argument gain strength from the fact that some patterns of racketeering will include fraud, which is generally associated with a different accrual rule; we have already found the connection between civil RICO and fraud to be an insufficient ground for recognizing a limitations period beyond four years, Malley-Duff, supra, at 149, and the lenient rule Rotella seeks would amount to backsliding from Malley-Duff.
What is equally bad is that a less demanding basic discovery rule than federal law generally applies would clash with the limitations imposed on Clayton Act suits. This is important because, as we have previously noted, there is a clear legislative record of congressional reliance on the Clayton Act when RICO was under consideration, see Sedima, S. P. R. L. v. Imrex Co., 473 U. S. 479, 489 (1985), and we have recognized before that the Clayton Act's injury-focused accrual rule was well established by the time civil RICO was enacted. Klehr, 521 U. S., at 189. In rejecting a significantly different focus under RICO, therefore, we are honoring an analogy that Congress itself accepted and relied upon, and one that promotes the objectives of civil RICO as readily as it furthers the objects of the Clayton Act. Both statutes share a common congressional objective of encouraging civil litigation to supplement Government efforts to deter and penalize the respectively prohibited practices. The object of civil RICO is thus not merely to compensate victims but to turn them into prosecutors, "private attorneys general," dedicated to eliminating racketeering activity.3 Id., at 187
3 This objective of encouraging prompt litigation to combat racketeering is the most obvious answer to Rotella's argument that the injury and pattern discovery rule should be adopted because "RICO is to be read
557
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