Opinion of the Court
Yates v. United States, 574 U. S. 528, 547 (2015) (plurality opinion); see also 18 U. S. C. §1518 (proscribing acts to obstruct the communication of certain information to criminal investigators).[1]
The Solicitor General explains that many state obstruction offenses as of 1996 similarly did not require that an investigation or proceeding be pending. See, e.g., Fla. Stat. §914.22(3)(a) (1997); N. D. Cent. Code Ann. §12.1–09–01(3)(c) (1997); State v. O’Neill, 165 Vt. 270, 682 A. 2d 943 (1996); Brief for Attorney General 36–43 (collecting statutes); see also Commonwealth v. Berry, 141 Ky. 477, 481, 133 S. W. 212, 213 (1911); cf. Esquivel-Quintana, 581 U. S., at 395–397 (looking to state statutes). Some States did not label the relevant offenses as “obstruction of justice,” but instead labeled the offenses with a more precise term for the particular category of obstruction at issue, such as witness tampering. But Congress accounted for the variations in labels by crafting the relevant definition in §1101(a)(43)(S) to cover offenses “relating to obstruction of justice,” not just offenses labeled as “obstruction of justice.” In any event, the terminology that States use to categorize criminal offenses is not dispositive because our inquiry here does not turn on “technical definitions and labels under state law.” Taylor, 495 U. S., at 590.
For obstruction offenses, the Model Penal Code also generally does not require that an investigation or
- ↑ To be sure, one of those offenses—18 U. S. C. §1519—was enacted after the passage of §1101(a)(43)(S) in its current form in 1996. But §1519, too, reflects the longstanding ordinary understanding of obstruction of justice—and no one here suggests that the ordinary understanding in the years after 1996 somehow differed from the ordinary understanding in 1996. See Branch v. Smith, 538 U. S. 254, 281 (2003) (plurality opinion of Scalia, J.) (“the most rudimentary rule of statutory construction” is “that courts do not interpret statutes in isolation, but in the context of the corpus juris of which they are a part, including later-enacted statutes”).
