504
Opinion of the Court
The principle that a civil conspiracy plaintiff must claim injury from an act of a tortious character was so widely accepted at the time of RICO's adoption as to be incorporated in the common understanding of "civil conspiracy." See Ballentine's Law Dictionary 252 (3d ed. 1969) ("It is the civil wrong resulting in damage, and not the conspiracy which constitutes the cause of action"); Black's Law Dictionary 383 (4th ed. 1968) ("[W]here, in carrying out the design of the conspirators, overt acts are done causing legal damage, the person injured has a right of action" (emphasis added)). We presume, therefore, that when Congress established in RICO a civil cause of action for a person "injured . . . by reason of" a "conspir[acy]," it meant to adopt these well-established common-law civil conspiracy principles.
Justice Stevens does not challenge our view that Congress meant to incorporate common-law principles when it adopted RICO. Nor does he attempt to make an affirmative case from the common law for his reading of the statute by pointing to a case in which there was (a) an illegal agreement; (b) injury proximately caused to the plaintiff by a nontortious overt act in furtherance of the agreement; and (c) recovery by the plaintiff. See post, at 508. Instead, he argues only that courts, authoritative commentators, and even dictionaries repeatedly articulated a rule with no meaning or application.8 We find this argument to be implausible
472, 479 (CADC 1983) (stating that civil conspiracy requires "an overt tortious act in furtherance of the agreement that causes injury. . . . Since liability for civil conspiracy depends on performance of some underlying tortious act, the conspiracy is not independently actionable; rather, it is a means for establishing vicarious liability for the underlying tort").
8 We disagree, moreover, with Justice Stevens' interpretation of the grounds for decision in some of the cases we have cited. For example, Justice Stevens reads Mills v. Hansell, 378 F. 2d 53 (CA5 1967) (per curiam), and Chapman v. Pollock, 148 F. Supp. 769, 772 (WD Mo. 1957), to deny recovery for conspiracy because the defendants had not entered into an unlawful agreement. See post, at 508-509. We think the opinions, and the language cited from these opinions by Justice Stevens,
Page: Index Previous 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 NextLast modified: October 4, 2007