Source: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/579/15-138/
Timestamp: 2020-08-13 12:16:13
Document Index: 91777661

Matched Legal Cases: ['§1962', '§4', '§1961', '§1961', '§1961', '§1961', '§1962', '§1962', '§10', '§10', '§1962', '§1962', '§2332', '§1332', '§1962', '§1964', '§1964', '§1962', '§1964', '§4', '§15', '§1964', '§1964', '§1964', '§12', '§1961', '§1964', '§1962', '§1964', '§1961', '§1961', '§1961', '§1962', '§1963', '§1964', '§1962', '§1964', '§1964', '§1962', '§1964', '§1962', '§1964', '§1964', '§1964', '§4', '§15', '§4', '§4', '§1964', '§4', '§4', '§1964', '§4', '§1964', '§4', '§84', '§1961']

RJR Nabisco, Inc. v. European Cmty. :: 579 U.S. ___ (2016) :: Justia US Supreme Court Center
Justia › US Law › US Case Law › US Supreme Court › Volume 579 › RJR Nabisco, Inc. v. European Cmty.
The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), makes it a crime to invest income derived from a pattern of racketeering activity in an enterprise “which is engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce,” 18 U.S.C. 1962(a); to acquire or maintain an interest in an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity, 1962(b); to conduct an enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity, 1962(c); and to conspire to violate any of the other three prohibitions, 1962(d). Section 1964(c) creates a private right of action. The European Community and 26 member states filed a RICO civil suit, alleging that RJR participated in a global money-laundering scheme in association with organized crime groups, under which drug traffickers smuggled narcotics into Europe and sold them for euros that—through black-market money brokers, cigarette importers, and wholesalers—were used to pay for large shipments of RJR cigarettes into Europe. The Second Circuit reversed dismissal of the claims, concluding that RICO permits recovery for a foreign injury caused by the violation of a predicate statute that applies extraterritorially. The Supreme Court reversed, first noting the presumption against extraterritoriality. While allegations under Sections 1962 (b) and (c) do not involve an impermissibly extraterritorial application of RICO, Section 1964(c), creating private remedies, does not overcome the presumption against extraterritoriality. Allowing recovery for foreign injuries in a civil RICO action could create a danger of international friction that militates against recognizing foreign-injury claims without clear direction from Congress that is not present in Section 1964(c).
No private right of action arises under RICO for a foreign injury caused by the violation of a predicate statute that applies outside the U.S., unless Congress clearly provides this right of action.
1. The law of extraterritoriality provides guidance in determining RICO’s reach to events outside the United States. The Court applies a canon of statutory construction known as the presumption against extraterritoriality: Absent clearly expressed congressional intent to the contrary, federal laws will be construed to have only domestic application. Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., 561 U. S. 247 . Morrison and Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 569 U. S. ___, reflect a two-step framework for analyzing extraterritoriality issues. First, the Court asks whether the presumption against extraterritoriality has been rebutted—i.e., whether the statute gives a clear, affirmative indication that it applies extraterritorially. This question is asked regardless of whether the particular statute regulates conduct, affords relief, or merely confers jurisdiction. If, and only if, the statute is not found extraterritorial at step one, the Court moves to step two, where it examines the statute’s “focus” to determine whether the case involves a domestic application of the statute. If the conduct relevant to the statute’s focus occurred in the United States, then the case involves a permissible domestic application even if other conduct occurred abroad; but if the relevant conduct occurred in a foreign country, then the case involves an impermissible extraterritorial application regardless of whether other conduct occurred in U. S. territory. In the event the statute is found to have clear extraterritorial effect at step one, then the statute’s scope turns on the limits Congress has or has not imposed on the statute’s foreign application, and not on the statute’s “focus.” Pp. 7–10.
(b) Section 1964(c) does not provide a clear indication that Congress intended to provide a private right of action for injuries suffered outside of the United States. It provides a cause of action to “[a]ny person injured in his business or property” by a violation of §1962, but neither the word “any” nor the reference to injury to “business or property” indicates extraterritorial application. Respondents’ arguments to the contrary are unpersuasive. In particular, while they are correct that RICO’s private right of action was modeled after §4 of the Clayton Act, which allows recovery for injuries suffered abroad as a result of antitrust violations, see Pfizer Inc. v. Government of India, 434 U. S. 308 –315, this Court has declined to transplant features of the Clayton Act’s cause of action into the RICO context where doing so would be inappropriate. Cf. Sedima, S. P. R. L. v. Imrex Co., 473 U. S. 479 . There is good reason not to do so here. Most importantly, RICO lacks the very language that the Court found critical to its decision in Pfizer, namely, the Clayton Act’s definition of a “person” who may sue, which “explicitly includes ‘corporations and associations existing under or authorized by . . . the laws of any foreign country,’ ” 434 U. S., at 313. Congress’s more recent decision to exclude from the antitrust laws’ reach most conduct that “causes only foreign injury,” F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd v. Empagran S. A., 542 U. S. 155 , also counsels against importing into RICO those Clayton Act principles that are at odds with the Court’s current extraterritoriality doctrine. Pp. 22–27.
RICO is founded on the concept of racketeering activity. The statute defines “racketeering activity” to encompass dozens of state and federal offenses, known in RICO parlance as predicates. These predicates include any act “indictable” under specified federal statutes, §§1961(1)(B)–(C), (E)–(G), as well as certain crimes “chargeable” under state law, §1961(1)(A), and any offense involving bankruptcy or securities fraud or drug-related activity that is “punishable” under federal law, §1961(1)(D). A predicate offense implicates RICO when it is part of a “pattern of racketeering activity”—a series of related predicates that together demonstrate the existence or threat of continued criminal activity. H. J. Inc. v. Northwestern Bell Telephone Co., 492 U. S. 229, 239 (1989) ; see §1961(5) (specifying that a “pattern of racketeering activity” requires at least two predicates committed within 10 years of each other).
RICO’s §1962 sets forth four specific prohibitions aimed at different ways in which a pattern of racketeering activ-ity may be used to infiltrate, control, or operate “a[n] en-terprise which is engaged in, or the activities of which affect, interstate or foreign commerce.” These prohibitions can be summarized as follows. Section 1962(a) makes it unlawful to invest income derived from a pattern of racketeering activity in an enterprise. Section 1962(b) makes it unlawful to acquire or maintain an interest in an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity. Section 1962(c) makes it unlawful for a person employed by or associated with an enterprise to conduct the enterprise’s affairs through a pattern of racketeering activity. Finally, §1962(d) makes it unlawful to conspire to violate any of the other three prohibitions.[1]
It is a basic premise of our legal system that, in general, “United States law governs domestically but does not rule the world.” Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp., 550 U. S. 437, 454 (2007) . This principle finds expression in a canon of statutory construction known as the presumption against extraterritoriality: Absent clearly expressed congressional intent to the contrary, federal laws will be construed to have only domestic application. Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., 561 U. S. 247, 255 (2010) . The question is not whether we think “Congress would have wanted” a statute to apply to foreign conduct “if it had thoughtof the situation before the court,” but whether Congress has affirmatively and unmistakably instructed that the statute will do so. Id., at 261. “When a statute gives no clear indication of an extraterritorial application, it has none.” Id., at 255.
There are several reasons for this presumption. Most notably, it serves to avoid the international discord that can result when U. S. law is applied to conduct in foreign countries. See, e.g., Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum Co., 569 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2013) (slip op., at 4–5); EEOC v. Arabian American Oil Co., 499 U. S. 244, 248 (1991) (Aramco); Benz v. Compania Naviera Hidalgo, S. A., 353 U. S. 138, 147 (1957) . But it also reflects the more prosaic “commonsense notion that Congress generally legislates with domestic concerns in mind.” Smith v. United States, 507 U. S. 197 , n. 5 (1993). We therefore apply the presumption across the board, “regardless of whether there is a risk of conflict between the American statute and a foreign law.” Morrison, supra, at 255.
What if we find at step one that a statute clearly does have extraterritorial effect? Neither Morrison nor Kiobel involved such a finding. But we addressed this issue in Morrison, explaining that it was necessary to consider §10(b)’s “focus” only because we found that the statute does not apply extraterritorially: “If §10(b) did apply abroad, we would not need to determine which transnational frauds it applied to; it would apply to all of them (barring some other limitation).” 561 U. S., at 267, n. 9. The scope of an extraterritorial statute thus turns on the limits Congress has (or has not) imposed on the statute’s foreign application, and not on the statute’s “focus.”[5]
We agree with the Second Circuit that Congress’s incorporation of these (and other) extraterritorial predicates into RICO gives a clear, affirmative indication that §1962 applies to foreign racketeering activity—but only to the extent that the predicates alleged in a particular case themselves apply extraterritorially. Put another way, a pattern of racketeering activity may include or consist of offenses committed abroad in violation of a predicate statute for which the presumption against extraterritoriality has been overcome. To give a simple (albeit grim) example, a violation of §1962 could be premised on a pattern of killings of Americans abroad in violation of §2332(a)—a predicate that all agree applies extraterritorially—whether or not any domestic predicates are also alleged.[6]
Seeking to avoid this result, RJR offers that any “ ‘emissaries’ ” a foreign enterprise sends to the United States—such as our hypothetical U. S.-based corporate manager—could be carved off and considered a “distinct domestic enterprise” under an association-in-fact theory. Brief for Petitioners 40. RJR’s willingness to gerrymander the enterprise to get around its proposed domestic enterprise requirement is telling. It suggests that RJR is not really concerned about whether an enterprise is foreign or domestic, but whether the relevant conduct occurred here or abroad. And if that is the concern, then it is the pattern of racketeering activity that matters, not the enterprise. Even spotting RJR its “domestic emissary” theory, this approach would lead to strange gaps in RICO’s coverage. If a foreign enterprise sent only a single “emissary” to engage in racketeering in the United States, there could be no RICO liability because a single person cannot be both the RICO enterprise and the RICO defendant. Cedric Kushner Promotions, Ltd. v. King, 533 U. S. 158, 162 (2001) .
RJR also offers no satisfactory way of determining whether an enterprise is foreign or domestic. Like the District Court, RJR maintains that courts can apply the “nerve center” test that we use to determine a corporation’s principal place of business for purposes of federal diversity jurisdiction. See Hertz Corp. v. Friend, 559 U. S. 77 (2010) ; 28 U. S. C. §1332(c)(1); 2011 WL 843957, at *5–*6. But this test quickly becomes meaningless if, as RJR suggests, a corporation with a foreign nerve center can, if necessary, be pruned into an association-in-fact enterprise with a domestic nerve center. The nerve center test, developed with ordinary corporate command structures in mind, is also ill suited to govern RICO association-in-fact enterprises, which “need not have a hierarchical structure or a ‘chain of command.’ ” Boyle v. United States, 556 U. S. 938, 948 (2009) . These difficulties are largely avoided if, as we conclude today, RICO’s extraterritorial effect is pegged to the extraterritoriality judgments Congress has made in the predicate statutes, often by providing precise instructions as to when those statutes apply to foreign conduct.
RJR does not dispute these characterizations of the alleged predicates. We therefore assume without deciding that the alleged pattern of racketeering activity consists entirely of predicate offenses that were either committed in the United States or committed in a foreign country in violation of a predicate statute that applies extraterritorially. The alleged enterprise also has a sufficient tie to U. S. commerce, as its members include U. S. companies, and its activities depend on sales of RJR’s cigarettes conducted through “the U. S. mails and wires,” among other things. App. to Pet. for Cert. 186a, Complaint ¶96. On these premises, respondents’ allegations that RJR violated §§1962(b) and (c) do not involve an impermissibly extraterritorial application of RICO.[8]
The same logic requires that we separately apply the presumption against extraterritoriality to RICO’s cause of action despite our conclusion that the presumption has been overcome with respect to RICO’s substantive prohibitions. “The creation of a private right of action raises issues beyond the mere consideration whether underlying primary conduct should be allowed or not, entailing, for example, a decision to permit enforcement without the check imposed by prosecutorial discretion.” Sosa v. Alvarez-Machain, 542 U. S. 692, 727 (2004) . Thus, as we have observed in other contexts, providing a private civil remedy for foreign conduct creates a potential for international friction beyond that presented by merely applying U. S. substantive law to that foreign conduct. See, e.g., Kiobel, supra, at ___ (slip op., at 6) (“Each of th[e] decisions” involved in defining a cause of action based on “conduct within the territory of another sovereign” “carries with it significant foreign policy implications”).
Consider antitrust. In that context, we have observed that “[t]he application . . . of American private treble-damages remedies to anticompetitive conduct taking place abroad has generated considerable controversy” in other nations, even when those nations agree with U. S. substantive law on such things as banning price fixing. F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd v. Empagran S. A., 542 U. S. 155, 167 (2004). Numerous foreign countries—including some respondents in this case—advised us in Empagran that “to apply [U. S.] remedies would unjustifiably permit their citizens to bypass their own less generous remedial schemes, thereby upsetting a balance of competing considerations that their own domestic antitrust laws embody.” Ibid.[9]
The Second Circuit did not identify anything in §1964(c) that shows that the statute reaches foreign injuries. Instead, the court reasoned that §1964(c)’s extraterritorial effect flows directly from that of §1962. Citing our holding in Sedima, S. P. R. L. v. Imrex Co., 473 U. S. 479 (1985) , that the “compensable injury” addressed by §1964(c) “necessarily is the harm caused by predicate acts sufficiently related to constitute a pattern,” id., at 497, the Court of Appeals held that a RICO plaintiff may sue for foreign injury that was caused by the violation of a predicate statute that applies extraterritorially, just as a substantive RICO violation may be based on extraterritorial predicates. 764 F. 3d, at 151. Justice Ginsburg advances the same theory. See post, at 4–5 (opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part). This reasoning has surface appeal, but it fails to appreciate that the presumption against extraterritoriality must be applied separately to both RICO’s substantive prohibitions and its private right of action. See supra, at 18–22. It is not enough to say that a private right of action must reach abroad because the underlying law governs conduct in foreign countries. Something more is needed, and here it is absent.[10]
Respondents and Justice Ginsburg point out that RICO’s private right of action was modeled after §4 of the Clayton Act, 15 U. S. C. §15; see Holmes v. Securities Investor Protection Corporation, 503 U. S. 258 –268 (1992), which we have held allows recovery for injuries suffered abroad as a result of antitrust violations, see Pfizer Inc. v. Government of India, 434 U. S. 308 –315 (1978). It follows, respondents and Justice Ginsburg contend, that §1964(c) likewise allows plaintiffs to sue for injuries suffered in foreign countries. We disagree. Al-though we have often looked to the Clayton Act for guidance in construing §1964(c), we have not treated the two statutes as interchangeable. We have declined to transplant features of the Clayton Act’s cause of action into the RICO context where doing so would be inappropriate. For example, in Sedima we held that a RICO plaintiff need not allege a special “racketeering injury,” rejecting a requirement that some lower courts had adopted by “[a]nalog[y]” to the “antitrust injury” required under the Clayton Act. 473 U. S., at 485, 495.
There is good reason not to interpret §1964(c) to cover foreign injuries just because the Clayton Act does so. When we held in Pfizer that the Clayton Act allows recovery for foreign injuries, we relied first and foremost on the fact that the Clayton Act’s definition of “person”—which in turn defines who may sue under that Act—“explicitly includes ‘corporations and associations existing under or authorized by . . . the laws of any foreign country.’ ” 434 U. S., at 313; see 15 U. S. C. §12.[11] RICO lacks the language that the Pfizer Court found critical. See 18 U. S. C. §1961(3).[12] To the extent that the Pfizer Court cited other factors that might apply to §1964(c), they were not sufficient in themselves to show that the provision has extraterritorial effect. For example, the Pfizer Court, writing before we honed our extraterritoriality jurisprudence in Morrison and Kiobel, reasoned that Congress “[c]learly . . . did not intend to make the [Clayton Act’s] treble-damages remedy available only to consumers in our own country” because “the antitrust laws extend to trade ‘with foreign nations’ as well as among the several States of the Union.” 434 U. S., at 313–314. But we have emphatically rejected reliance on such language, holding that “ ‘even statutes . . . that expressly refer to “foreign commerce” do not apply abroad.’ ” Morrison, 561 U. S., at 262–263. This reasoning also fails to distinguish between extending substantive antitrust law to foreign conduct and extending a private right of action to foreign injuries, two separate issues that, as we have explained, raise distinct extraterritoriality problems. See supra, at 18–22. Finally, the Pfizer Court expressed concern that it would “defeat th[e] purposes” of the antitrust laws if a defendant could “escape full liability for his illegal actions.” 434 U. S., at 314. But this justification was merely an attempt to “divin[e] what Congress would have wanted” had it considered the question of extraterritoriality—an approach we eschewed in Morrison. 561 U. S., at 261. Given all this, and in particular the fact that RICO lacks the language that Pfizer found integral to its decision, we decline to extend this aspect of our Clayton Act jurisprudence to RICO’s cause of action.
1 In full, 18 U. S. C. §1962 provides:
2 In full, §1964(c) provides:
4 At an earlier stage of respondents’ litigation against RJR, the Second Circuit “held that the revenue rule barred the foreign sovereigns’ civil claims for recovery of lost tax revenue and law enforcement costs.” European Community v. RJR Nabisco, Inc., 424 F. 3d 175, 178 (2005) (Sotomayor, J.), cert. denied, 546 U. S. 1092 (2006) . It is unclear why respondents subsequently included these alleged injuries in their present complaint; they do not ask us to disturb or distinguish the Second Circuit’s holding that such injuries are not cognizable. We express no opinion on the matter. Cf. Pasquantino v. United States, 544 U. S. 349 , n. 1 (2005).
5 Because a finding of extraterritoriality at step one will obviate step two’s “focus” inquiry, it will usually be preferable for courts to proceed in the sequence that we have set forth. But we do not mean to preclude courts from starting at step two in appropriate cases. Cf. Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U. S. 223 –243 (2009).
6 The foreign killings would, of course, still have to satisfy the relatedness and continuity requirements of RICO’s pattern element. See H. J. Inc. v. Northwestern Bell Telephone Co., 492 U. S. 229 (1989) .
9 See Brief for Governments of Federal Republic of Germany et al. as Amici Curiae, O. T. 2003, No. 03–724, p. 11 (identifying “controversial features of the U. S. legal system,” including treble damages, extensive discovery, jury trials, class actions, contingency fees, and punitive damages); id., at 15 (“Private plaintiffs rarely exercise the type of self-restraint or demonstrate the requisite sensitivity to the concerns of foreign governments that mark actions brought by the United States government”); Brief for United Kingdom et al. as Amici Curiae, O. T. 2003, No. 03–724, p. 13 (“No other country has adopted the United States’ unique ‘bounty hunter’ approach that permits a private plaintiff to ‘recover threefold the damages by him sustained, and the cost of suit, including a reasonable attorney’s fee.’ . . . Expanding the jurisdiction of this generous United States private claim system could skew enforcement and increase international business risks. It makes United States courts the forum of choice without regard to whose laws are applied, where the injuries occurred or even if there is any connection to the court except the ability to get in personam jurisdiction over the defendants”); see also Brief for Government of Canada as Amicus Curiae, O. T. 2003, No. 03–724, p. 14 (“[T]he attractiveness of the [U. S.] treble damages remedy would supersede the national policy decision by Canada that civil recovery by Canadian citizens for injuries resulting from anti-competitive behavior in Canada should be limited to actual damages”). Empagran concerned not the presumption against extraterritoriality per se, but the related rule that we construe statutes to avoid unreasonable interference with other nations’ sovereign authority where possible. See F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd v. Empagran S. A., 542 U. S. 155, 164 (2004) ; see also Hartford Fire Ins. Co. v. California, 509 U. S. 764 –815 (1993) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (discussing the two canons). As the foregoing discussion makes clear, considerations relevant to one rule are often relevant to the other.
10 Respondents note that Sedima itself involved an injury suffered by a Belgian corporation in Belgium. Brief for Respondents 45–46; see Sedima, S. P. R. L. v. Imrex Co., 473 U. S. 479 –484 (1985). Respondents correctly do not contend that this fact is controlling here, as the Sedima Court did not address the foreign-injury issue.
11 Pfizer most directly concerned whether a foreign government is a “person” that may be a Clayton Act plaintiff. But it is clear that the Court’s decision more broadly concerned recovery for foreign injuries, see 434 U. S., at 315 (expressing concern that “persons doing business both in this country and abroad might be tempted to enter into anticompetitive conspiracies affecting American consumers in the expectation that the illegal profits they could safely extort abroad would offset any liability to plaintiffs at home”), as respondents themselves contend, see Brief for Respondents 44 (“[T]his Court clearly recognized in Pfizer that Section 4 extends to foreign injuries”). The Court also permitted an antitrust plaintiff to sue for foreign injuries in Continental Ore Co. v. Union Carbide & Carbon Corp., 370 U. S. 690 (1962) , but the Court’s discussion in that case focused on the extraterritoriality of the underlying antitrust prohibitions, not the Clayton Act’s private right of action, see id., at 704–705, and so sheds little light on the interpretive question now before us.
In enacting the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), 18 U. S. C. §1961 et seq., Congress sought to provide a new tool to combat “organized crime and its economic roots.” Russello v. United States, 464 U. S. 16, 26 (1983) . RICO accordingly proscribes various ways in which an “enterprise,” §1961(4), might be controlled, operated, or funded by a “pattern of racketeering activity,” §1961(1), (5). See §1962.[1] RICO builds on predicate statutes, many of them applicable extraterritorially. App. to Brief for United States as Amicus Curiae 27a–33a. Congress not only armed the United States with authority to initiate criminal and civil proceedings to enforce RICO, §§1963, 1964(b), Congress also created in §1964(c) a private right of action for “[a]ny person injured in his business or property by reason of a violation of [RICO’s substantive provision].”
As the Court recounts, ante, at 7, “Congress ordinarily legislates with respect to domestic, not foreign, matters.” Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., 561 U. S. 247, 255 (2010) . So recognizing, the Court employs a presumption that “ ‘legislation . . . is meant to apply only within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.’ ” Ibid. (quoting EEOC v. Arabian American Oil Co., 499 U. S. 244, 248 (1991) (Aramco)). But when a statute demonstrates Congress’ “affirmative inten[t]” that the law should apply beyond the borders of the United States, as numerous RICO predicate statutes do, the presumption is rebutted, and the law applies extraterritorially to the extent Congress prescribed. See Morrison, 561 U. S., at 255 (quoting Aramco, 499 U. S., at 248). The presumption, in short, aims to distinguish instances in which Congress con-sciously designed a statute to reach beyond U. S. borders, from those in which nothing plainly signals that Congress directed extraterritorial application.
I would not distinguish, as the Court does, between the extraterritorial compass of a private right of action and that of the underlying proscribed conduct. See ante, at 18–22, 23, 26. Instead, I would adhere to precedent addressing RICO, linking, not separating, prohibited activities and authorized remedies. See Sedima, S. P. R. L. v. Imrex Co., 473 U. S. 479, 495 (1985) (“If the defendant engages in a pattern of racketeering activity in a manner forbidden by [§1962], and the racketeering activities injure the plaintiff in his business or property, the plaintiff has a claim under §1964(c).”); ibid. (refusing to require a “distinct ‘racketeering injury’ ” for private RICO actions under §1964(c) where §1962 imposes no such requirement).[2]
To reiterate, a §1964(c) right of action may be maintained by “[a]ny person injured in his business or property by reason of a violation of section 1962” (emphasis added). “[I]ncorporating one statute . . . into another,” the Court has long understood, “serves to bring into the latter all that is fairly covered by the reference.” Panama R. Co. v. Johnson, 264 U. S. 375, 392 (1924) . RICO’s private right of action, it cannot be gainsaid, expressly incorporates §1962, whose extraterritoriality, the Court recognizes, is coextensive with the underlying predicate offenses charged. See ante, at 10–18. See also ante, at 12 (“[I]t is hard to imagine how Congress could have more clearly indicated that it intended RICO to have (some) extraterritorial effect.”). The sole additional condition §1964(c) imposes on access to relief is an injury to one’s “business or property.” Nothing in that condition should change the extraterritoriality assessment. In agreement with the Second Circuit, I would hold that “[i]f an injury abroad was proximately caused by the violation of a statute which Congress intended should apply to injurious conduct performed abroad, [there is] no reason to import a domestic injury requirement simply because the victim sought redress through the RICO statute.” 764 F. 3d 149, 151 (2014).
What §1964(c)’s text conveys is confirmed by its history. As this Court has repeatedly observed, Congress modeled §1964(c) on §4 of the Clayton Act, 15 U. S. C. §15, the private civil-action provision of the federal antitrust laws, which employs nearly identical language: “[A]ny person who shall be injured in his business or property by reason of anything forbidden in the antitrust laws may sue therefor.” See Klehr v. A. O. Smith Corp., 521 U. S. 179 –190 (1997); Holmes v. Securities Investor Protection Corporation, 503 U. S. 258 –268 (1992); Sedima, 473 U. S., at 485, 489. Clayton Act §4, the Court has held, provides a remedy for injuries both foreign and domestic. Pfizer Inc. v. Government of India, 434 U. S. 308 –314 (1978) (“Congress did not intend to make the [Clayton Act’s] treble-damages remedy available only to consumers in our own country.”); Continental Ore Co. v. Union Carbide & Carbon Corp., 370 U. S. 690 –708 (1962) (allowing recovery in Clayton Act §4 suit for injuries in Canada).
“The similarity of language in [the two statutes] is, of course, a strong indication that [they] should be interpreted pari passu,” Northcross v. Board of Ed. of Memphis City Schools, 412 U. S. 427, 428 (1973) (per curiam), and I see no contradictory indication here.[3] Indeed, when the Court has addressed gaps in §1964(c), it has aligned the RICO private right of action with the private right afforded by Clayton Act §4. See, e.g., Klehr, 521 U. S., at 188–189 (adopting for private RICO actions Clayton Act §4’s ac-crual rule—that a claim accrues when a defendant commits an act that injures a plaintiff’s business—rather than criminal RICO’s “most recent, predicate act” rule); Holmes, 503 U. S., at 268 (requiring private plaintiffs under §1964(c), like private plaintiffs under Clayton Act §4, to show proximate cause); Agency Holding Corp. v. Malley-Duff & Associates, Inc., 483 U. S. 143 –156 (1987) (applying to §1964(c) actions Clayton Act §4’s shorter statute of limitations instead of “catchall” federal statute of limitations applicable to RICO criminal prosecutions).
To the extent extraterritorial application of RICO could give rise to comity concerns not present in this case, those concerns can be met through doctrines that serve to block litigation in U. S. courts of cases more appropriately brought elsewhere. Where an alternative, more appropriate forum is available, the doctrine of forum non conveniens enables U. S. courts to refuse jurisdiction. See Piper Aircraft Co. v. Reyno, 454 U. S. 235 (1981) (dismissing wrongful-death action arising out of air crash in Scotland involving only Scottish victims); Restatement (Second) of Conflict of Laws §84 (1969). Due process constraints on the exercise of general personal jurisdiction shelter foreign corporations from suit in the United States based on conduct abroad unless the corporation’s “affiliations with the [forum] in which suit is brought are so constant and pervasive ‘as to render it essentially at home [there].’ ” Daimler AG v. Bauman, 571 U. S. ___, ___–___ (2014) (slip op., at 2–3) (quoting Goodyear Dunlop Tires Operations, S. A. v. Brown, 564 U. S. 915, 919 (2011) ; alterations omitted). These controls provide a check against civil RICO litigation with little or no connection to the United States.
In saying this, I note that this case does not involve the kind of purely foreign facts that create what we have sometimes called “foreign-cubed” litigation (i.e., cases where the plaintiffs are foreign, the defendants are foreign, and all the relevant conduct occurred abroad). See, e.g., Morrison v. National Australia Bank Ltd., 561 U. S. 247 , n. 11 (2010) (Stevens, J., concurring in judgment). Rather, it has been argued that the statute at issue does not extend to such a case. See 18 U. S. C. §1961(1) (limiting qualifying RICO predicates to those that are, e.g., “chargeable” under state law, or “indictable” or “punishable” under federal law); Tr. of Oral Arg. 32, 33–34 (respondents conceding that all of the relevant RICO predicates require some kind of connection to the United States). And, as Justice Ginsburg points out, “this case has the United States written all over it.” Ante, at 7 (opinion concurring in part, dissenting in part, and dissenting from judgment).