Medical Marijuana, Inc. v. Horn, Docket No. 23-365

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In the case of Medical Marijuana, Inc. v. Horn, the Supreme Court looked at whether people can get extra damages for business or property losses, even if those losses started with a personal injury. The law in question is called RICO, which is usually used to fight organized crime, but it can also be used in civil lawsuits.

The Court decided that if someone loses money or property because of something that started as a personal injury, they can still ask for triple damages under RICO. This goes against what some lower courts had said before, which was that you couldn’t get these damages if your business or property loss was tied to a personal injury. This decision could change how some lawsuits are handled, especially when business losses are connected to personal injuries.

Summary of the Case

Douglas Horn, a long-haul truck driver, began using “Dixie X,” a cannabidiol (CBD) tincture marketed as THC-free by Medical Marijuana, Inc., to treat chronic pain. After a workplace drug test detected THC, Horn was fired and sued under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), alleging that Medical Marijuana’s misrepresentations constituted mail and wire fraud predicates. The District Court granted summary judgment for Medical Marijuana, holding that Horn’s lost employment flowed from a personal injury (the ingestion of THC) and that §1964(c) forecloses recovery for personal injuries or for business or property losses derived from them. The Second Circuit reversed (80 F.4th 130 (2023)), holding that §1964(c) authorizes treble-damages suits for business or property losses even if they “derive from a personal injury,” and adopting a broad definition of “business” to include employment. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve a split among the Circuits over whether RICO bars suit for business or property harms that result from personal injury.

Opinion of the Court

Justice Barrett, for a 5–3 majority, addressed “whether civil RICO categorically bars recovery for business or property losses that derive from a personal injury”. Relying on the ordinary meaning of “injure” (“to cause harm or damage to”), she held that §1964(c) plainly authorizes suits by any person “injured in his business or property,” implicitly excluding personal injuries but not business or property harms that stem from them. The majority rejected petitioners’ term-of-art argument that “injured” requires invasion of a “legal right” in business or property, observing that context favors the ordinary definition and that “damages” must mean monetary redress, not “harm”. It found support in civil RICO precedent to import a common-law “situs” rule into §1964(c). Antitrust precedents construing identical language in the Clayton Act (§4, 38 Stat. 731) do not govern RICO. Finally, the majority stressed that RICO’s other limits — its proximate-cause requirement and “pattern” element — mitigate any over-federalization, and it left further policy refinements to Congress.

Separate Opinions

Justice Jackson concurred, emphasizing that Congress directed in §904(a), 84 Stat. 947, that RICO “shall be liberally construed to effectuate its remedial purposes.” She argued that a broad reading of the statute’s private-action provision is especially warranted given RICO’s “remedial” design and its civil provision’s purpose of enabling private enforcement of racketeering prohibitions.

Dissenting Opinions

Justice Thomas, joined by no other Justice, would have dismissed the writ as improvidently granted. He argued that we cannot know whether Horn suffered a personal injury because the District Court and parties disagreed below. He urged resolution of that threshold issue first and contended that no party fully briefed the definition of “injured in his business or property.”

Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, dissented on the merits. He maintained that “injured” is a term of art importing the tort-law definition—“the invasion of any legally protected interest”—and that RICO’s text, modeled on the Clayton Act, precludes personal-injury suits. Lost wages and medical costs, in his view, are merely damages flowing from a personal injury, not distinct business or property invasions.

RICO and Definition of Injury

When Congress added §1964(c) in 1970, it deliberately limited private RICO actions to persons “injured in [their] business or property,” implicitly excluding personal injuries. In American tort law, “injury” denotes the invasion of a legal right—personal, property, or business—distinct from the economic “damages” a victim sustains. By contrast, the majority reads “injured” in its ordinary sense (“harmed or damaged”), allowing recovery for business or property harm regardless of its source. This interpretation subverts RICO’s text and historic tort categories, which this Court and earlier antitrust decisions recognized when construing the identical “injured in his business or property” language. The statutory choice of the disjunctive “business or property” (not “and”), its modeling on Clayton Act §4, and the placement of “damages” as separate relief for a proved “injury” all underscore that Congress did not intend to federalize garden-variety personal-injury torts simply because they yield lost-wages or medical-expense damages.