Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 579.0

529US2

Unit: $U51

[09-26-01 10:31:04] PAGES PGT: OPIN

504

BECK v. PRUPIS

Opinion of the Court

The principle that a civil conspiracy plaintiff must claim
injury from an act of a tortious character was so widely ac-
cepted at the time of RICO’s adoption as to be incorporated
in the common understanding of “civil conspiracy.” See Bal-
lentine’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 Con-
gress 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 agree-
ment; (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 mean-
ing 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 opin-
ions, and the language cited from these opinions by Justice Stevens,