The Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) empowers “any person injured in his business or property by reason of a violation” of RICO’s prohibited activities provision to recover threefold damages in civil court. To determine what is an injury to “business or property” is to ascertain what type of interest must be injured to confer standing under civil RICO. In other words, the definition of “business or property” defines the class of plaintiffs upon whom Congress chose to confer a civil cause of action. The breadth of “business or property,” then, must be the breadth necessary to effectuate the purposes of the Act. As injury to “business or property” defines the potential universe of civil RICO plaintiffs, those terms are animated by the Act’s central purpose: “not merely . . . [to] compensate victims but to turn them into prosecutors, ‘private attorneys general,’” and “to divest the association of the fruits of its ill-gotten gains.” Courts struggling to define “business or property” as used in § 1964(c) have adopted markedly different approaches.

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