Opinion of the Court
conscious belief that his claims are false.
Second, Safeco did not purport to set forth the purely objective safe harbor that respondents invoke. To the contrary, Safeco stated that a person is reckless if he acts “knowing or having reason to know of facts which would lead a reasonable man to realize” that his actions were substantially risky. 551 U. S., at 69 (emphasis added; internal quotation marks omitted). Or, as Safeco alternatively put it, the common law of recklessness contained an objective standard because it encompassed actions involving “an unjustifiably high risk of harm that is either known or so obvious that it should be known.” Id., at 68 (emphasis added; internal quotation marks omitted); see also Restatement (Second) of Torts §500, Comment a (1964) (“Recklessness may consist of either of two different types of conduct. In one the actor knows … of facts which create a high degree of risk”). Thus, as we have stated previously, “[n]othing in Safeco suggests that we should look to facts that the defendant neither knew nor had reason to know at the time he acted.” Halo Electronics, 579 U. S., at 106.[1] By a similar token here, we do not look to legal interpretations that respondents did not believe or have reason to believe at the time they submitted their claims.
3
Respondents make one more argument, approaching the issue from a somewhat different angle. They contend that, at common law, their claims would not be actionable as fraudulent even if their reported prices were not accurate under the correct meaning of “usual and customary.” Their
- ↑ Respondents read a footnote in Safeco to establish the sort of purely objective safe harbor for which they argue. See Safeco, 551 U. S., at 70, n. 20. But that footnote—even if it does deem subjective intent to be irrelevant in the FCRA context—certainly was not meant to establish the general rule for the terms “knowing” or “reckless” in all contexts. Cf. Halo Electronics, 579 U. S., at 106, n. (distinguishing the footnote in the patent-infringement context).
