Despite these precedents, there was a circuit split with respect to whether RICO’s “business or property” limitation reaches economic harms arising from personal injuries allegedly caused by a RICO conspiracy. In Medical Marijuana, Inc. et al v. Horn, 80 F.4th 130 (2d Cir. 2023), Respondent, a commercial truck driver, took a hemp-derived Cannabidiol (CBD) product to treat his pain. While hemp and marijuana come from the same plant, hemp is made without the psychoactive effects from Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in marijuana. He sued Petitioners, the manufacturers of the medication, when he failed a routine drug test at work and lost his job. The Second Circuit held that plaintiffs bringing civil suits under this provision can recover for economic harms arising from personal injuries—including in product liability lawsuits.

Petitioners argued to the Court that while “injury” usually means a “harm,” it also means an “invasion of a legal right.” Based on that, they argued that the phrase “injured in his business or property” means “suffered an invasion of a business or property right”—or in other words, a business or property tort, which never gives rise to a civil RICO claim. In that case, they argued that assuming Mr. Horn did suffer a personal injury, he cannot “recast” his harm (losing his job) “as the basis for a RICO suit.” Med. Marijuana, Inc., 2025 U.S. LEXIS 1369, at *13. They further argued that such a reading of the statue is consistent with the Court’s prior ruling that “business or property” “cabin[s] RICO’s private cause of action to particular kinds of injury—excluding, for example, personal injuries.” Id. at *52 (dissent) (citing RJR Nabisco, Inc. v. Eur. Cmty., 579 U.S. 325, 350 (2016)).

Respondent argued that Petitioners urged the Court to adopt an “antecedent personal injury bar,” which would prohibit “recovery where a personal injury occurs in the chain of causation between the prohibited racketeering activity and an otherwise compensable business or property injury.” Respondent’s Opp. at 1. He argued that such a reading of the RICO statute “would override the statute’s text, undermine its purpose, and afford a windfall to criminal enterprises across the country.” Id.

Reed Smith, acting pro bono, filed an amicus brief urging the Court to reject this liability expansion. The Reed Smith brief for the U.S. Hemp Roundtable, Inc., an industrial hemp advocacy group, can be found online. Our brief provided background on the public benefits provided by the hemp industry and explains the adverse impacts that would follow from the extension of the RICO statute to personal injury recoveries. The harmful impacts in this instance extended to the manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors of industrial hemp products and, ultimately, to the consumers who benefit most from those products. But the adverse impacts do not stop with the hemp industry. Our brief further explained that given RICO’s generous venue and attorney fee provisions, RICO liability could be weaponized by plaintiffs’ lawyers to reach a wide variety of products and industries when lawsuits seeking recoveries for personal injuries—frequently including economic damages stemming from lost wages and medical expenses—are ubiquitous. The potential consequences include greater liability exposure, increases in defense costs, and in all likelihood, higher prices for liability insurance. The Reed Smith brief emphasized that these adverse effects should be avoided by keeping RICO liability within its intended and historic bounds.

The Court’s response

In finding that RICO claims can be brought “for all business or property harms that derive from a personal injury,” the U.S. Supreme Court engaged in a thorough assessment of the terms “harmed,” “injured,” and “damages,” explaining that the term “injured” in the context of RICO should be understood in its ordinary sense, meaning “to cause harm or damage” or to “hurt,” Med. Marijuana, Inc., 2025 U.S. LEXIS 1369, at *11-12, rather than as a specialized legal term referring to the invasion of a legal right, id. at *19. The majority opinion rejected the “antecedent-personal-injury bar,” which would have precluded recovery for business or property losses that derive from a personal injury. Id. at *20. The Court held that the statute's language does not support such a bar and that plaintiffs can recover for business or property losses regardless of whether they stem from a personal injury. Id. at *20-22.

Justice Jackson’s brief concurrence emphasized that Congress intended RICO to be liberally construed to effectuate its remedial purposes. She explained that “rejecting petitioners' attempts to add atextual hurdles to § 1964(c) accords with Congress’s liberal-construction directive.” Id. at 25.

Justice Thomas’s dissent asserts that this was not the proper case to take up the issue because there is an underlying dispute as to whether Mr. Horn suffered a personal injury. In fact, he wrote that this case was so “ill suited” to present these questions that he would have “dismiss[ed] the writ of certiorari as improvidently granted,” id. at *26, because the question of “whether economic losses flowing from personal injuries are injuries to business or property for purposes of civil RICO, or merely damages[] . . . assumes the existence of a personal injury as a starting point,” id. at *30. That did not exist here.

Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent, joined by Justices Roberts and Alito, disagrees with the majority’s holding and reasons that a “plaintiff cannot circumvent RICO’s categorical exclusion of personal-injury suits simply by alleging that a personal injury resulted in losses of business or property[.]”

Where does that leave us now?

Plain and simple: “Section 1964(c) provides that ‘[a]ny person injured in his business or property by reason of a violation of [RICO] may sue . . . .’ The ordinary meaning of ‘injure’ is to ‘cause harm or damage to’ or to ‘hurt.’ [citation omitted]. So the meaning of § 1964(c) is straightforward: A plaintiff has been ‘injured in his business or property’ if his business or property has been harmed or damaged.” Id. at *12. To be clear, “[t]he phrase ‘injured in his business or property’ does not preclude recovery for all economic harms that result from personal injuries.” Id. at 25.

Lest you think it is all bad, there are a few helpful nuggets. First, the Court was clear that it did not address whether Mr. Horn suffered a personal injury, whether the term “business” encompasses all aspects of “employment,” and what “injured in his . . . property” means for purposes of section 1964(c). Second, it acknowledged that section 1964(c) “does not allow for recovery for all harms. By explicitly permitting recovery for harms to business and property, section 1964(c) implicitly excludes recovery for harm to one’s person. Id. at *2. Third, the Court acknowledges that this ruling could open the floodgates, but that it trusts the three RICO “constraints” will keep future allegations on the straight and narrow: (1) plaintiffs must adequately allege a direct relation between the injury and the injurious conduct; mere foreseeability is insufficient; (2) there must be a pattern of racketeering, or in other words, two or more predicate crimes “within a single scheme that were related and that amount to, or threatened the likelihood of, continued criminal activity,” and (3) because “‘business’ may not encompass every aspect of employment, and ‘property’ may not include every penny in the plaintiff’s pocketbook[,] . . . not every monetary harm—be it lost wages, medical expenses, or otherwise—necessarily implicates RICO.” Id. at *23-24.

Time will tell, but RICO’s lax venue provision and allowance for treble damages certainly suggests that we may begin seeing attempts—whether or not they are successful—to test allegations of RICO violations in personal injury and product liability lawsuits.

In-depth 2025-103