Beyond ordinary Article III standing, civil RICO imposes a statutory standing requirement: the plaintiff must have been injured in business or property, and that injury must be proximately — not merely factually — caused by the predicate racketeering conduct. Courts require a direct relationship between the injury and the alleged violation, screening out plaintiffs whose harm is too indirect or derivative.

This proximate cause analysis often defeats claims by parties several steps removed from the racketeering conduct, such as a claimant harmed only through a chain of intervening events or through injury to a third party. Personal injury, emotional distress, and purely speculative future harm generally fall outside RICO's business-or-property injury requirement entirely.

In a Juricratic simulation, RICO standing is modeled as a threshold gate evaluated before the pattern, enterprise, and damages dials are engaged at all — a claim that fails proximate cause never reaches the point where predicate-act or damages strength matters.

Defense counsel raises standing as an early dismissal argument by mapping the causal chain between the alleged racketeering conduct and the plaintiff's claimed injury, looking for intervening causes or indirect harm that break proximate causation.