National Railroad Passenger Corporation v. Morgan, 536 U.S. 101, 27 (2002)

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Cite as: 536 U. S. 101 (2002)

Opinion of O'Connor, J.

tory acts as it is for claims based on hostile work environments. The longer time period is intended to give States and other political subdivisions time to review claims themselves, if they have a mechanism for doing so. The same rationale applies to review of the daily occurrences that make up a part of a hostile environment claim.

My approach is also consistent with that taken by the Court in other contexts. When describing an ongoing antitrust violation, for instance, we have stated:

"[E]ach overt act that is part of the violation and that injures the plaintiff . . . starts the statutory [limitations] period running again, regardless of the plaintiff's knowledge of the alleged illegality at much earlier times. . . . But the commission of a separate new overt act generally does not permit the plaintiff to recover for the injury caused by old overt acts outside the limitations period." Klehr v. A. O. Smith Corp., 521 U. S. 179, 189 (1997) (citations omitted).

Similarly, in actions under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 18 U. S. C. § 1961 et seq., concerning a pattern of racketeering activity, we rejected a rule that would have allowed plaintiffs to recover for all of the acts that made up the pattern so long as at least one occurred within the limitations period. In doing so, we endorsed the rule of several Circuits that, although "commission of a separable, new predicate act within [the] limitations period permits a plaintiff to recover for the additional damages caused by that act . . . the plaintiff cannot use an independent, new predicate act as a bootstrap to recover for injuries caused by other earlier predicate acts that took place outside the limitations period." 521 U. S., at 190; but cf. Rotella v. Wood, 528 U. S. 549, 554, n. 2, 557 (2000) (reserving the question of whether the injury discovery rule applies in civil RICO and, by extension, Clayton Act cases). The Court today allows precisely this sort of bootstrapping in the Title

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