Cite as: 503 U. S. 258 (1992)
Opinion of the Court
recover. See, e. g., 1 J. Sutherland, Law of Damages 55-56 (1882).
Although such directness of relationship is not the sole requirement of Clayton Act causation,15 it has been one of its central elements, Associated General Contractors, 459 U. S., at 540, for a variety of reasons. First, the less direct an injury is, the more difficult it becomes to ascertain the amount of a plaintiff's damages attributable to the violation, as distinct from other, independent, factors. Id., at 542-543. Second, quite apart from problems of proving factual causation, recognizing claims of the indirectly injured would force courts to adopt complicated rules apportioning damages among plaintiffs removed at different levels of injury from the violative acts, to obviate the risk of multiple recoveries. Id., at 543-544; Blue Shield of Virginia v. McCready, 457 U. S. 465, 473-475 (1982); Hawaii v. Standard Oil Co. of Cal., 405 U. S. 251, 264 (1972). And, finally, the need to grapple with these problems is simply unjustified by the general interest in deterring injurious conduct, since directly injured victims can generally be counted on to vindicate the law as
15 We have sometimes discussed the requirement that a § 4 plaintiff have suffered "antitrust injury" as a component of the proximate-cause enquiry. See Associated General Contractors of Cal., Inc. v. Carpenters, 459 U. S. 519, 538 (1983); Blue Shield of Virginia v. McCready, 457 U. S., at 481-484. We need not discuss it here, however, since "antitrust injury" has no analogue in the RICO setting. See Sedima, S. P. R. L. v. Imrex Co., 473 U. S. 479, 495-497 (1985).
For the same reason, there is no merit in SIPC's reliance on legislative history to the effect that it would be inappropriate to have a "private litigant . . . contend with a body of precedent—appropriate in a purely antitrust context—setting strict requirements on questions such as 'standing to sue' and 'proximate cause.' " 115 Cong. Rec. 6995 (1969) (American Bar Association comments on S. 2048). That statement is rightly understood to refer only to the applicability of the concept of "antitrust injury" to RICO, which we rejected in Sedima, supra, at 495-497. See Brandenburg v. Seidel, 859 F. 2d, at 1189, n. 11. Besides, even if we were to read this statement to say what SIPC says it means, it would not amount to more than background noise drowned out by the statutory language.
269
Page: Index Previous 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007