Holmes v. Securities Investor Protection Corporation, 503 U.S. 258, 32 (1992)

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Cite as: 503 U. S. 258 (1992)

Scalia, J., concurring in judgment

ante, at 280 (opinion concurring in part and concurring in judgment). If, for example, one statute gives persons injured by a particular criminal violation a cause of action for damages, and another statute gives them a cause of action for equitable relief, the persons coming within the zone of interests of those two statutes would be identical. Hence the relevance to this case of our decision in Blue Chip Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421 U. S. 723 (1975). The predicate acts of securities fraud alleged here are violations of Rule 10b-5; and we held in Blue Chip Stamps that the zone of interests for civil damages attributable to violation of that provision does not include persons who are not purchasers or sellers. As I have described above, just as RICO's statutory phrase "injured in his business or property by reason of" does not extend the rule of proximate causation otherwise applied to congressionally created causes of action, so also it should not extend the otherwise applicable rule of zone of interests.

What prevents that proposition from being determinative here, however, is the fact that Blue Chip Stamps did not involve application of the background zone-of-interests rule to a congressionally created Rule 10b-5 action, but rather specification of the contours of a Rule 10b-5 action "implied" (i. e., created) by the Court itself—a practice we have since happily abandoned, see, e. g., Touche Ross & Co. v. Redington, 442 U. S. 560, 568-571, 575-576 (1979). The policies that we identified in Blue Chip Stamps, supra, as supporting the purchaser-seller limitation (namely, the difficulty of assessing the truth of others' claims, see id., at 743-747, and the high threat of "strike" or nuisance suits in securities litigation, see id., at 740-741) are perhaps among the factors properly taken into account in determining the zone of interests covered by a statute, but they are surely not alone enough to restrict standing to purchasers or sellers under a text that contains no hint of such a limitation. I think, in other words, that the limitation we approved in Blue Chip Stamps was essentially a legislative judgment rather than an

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