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Page Number: 27

4 

YATES v. UNITED STATES 

ALITO, J., concurring in judgment 

at  4–6).  The  title  is  especially  valuable  here  because  it 
reinforces  what  the  text’s  nouns  and  verbs  independently 
suggest—that no matter how other statutes might be read,
this  particular  one  does  not  cover  every  noun  in  the  uni-
verse with tangible form. 

Titles,  of  course,  are  also  not  dispositive.    Here,  if  the 
list of nouns did not already suggest that “tangible object” 
should  mean  something  similar  to  records  or  documents,
especially when read in conjunction with §1519’s peculiar 
list of verbs with their focus on filekeeping, then the title 
would not be enough on its own.  In conjunction with those
other  two  textual  features,  however,  the  Government’s 
argument,  though  colorable,  becomes  too  implausible  to 
accept.  See,  e.g.,  Washington  State  Dept.  of  Social  and 
Health Servs. v. Guardianship Estate of Keffeler, 537 U. S. 
371,  384–385  (2003)  (focusing  on  the  “product  of  [two] 
canons  of  construction”  which  was  “confirmed”  by  other 
interpretative evidence); cf. Al-Adahi v. Obama, 613 F. 3d 
1102, 1105–1106 (CADC 2010) (aggregating evidence).