Yates v. United States (2015)

Yates v. United States
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued November 5, 2014 Decided February 25, 2015
Full case name	John L. Yates, Petitioner v. United States
Docket no.	13-7451
Citations	574 U.S. 528 (more) 135 S. Ct. 1074; 191 L. Ed. 2d 64
Case history
Prior	United States v. Yates, 733 F.3d 1059 (11th Cir. 2013)
Holding
For purposes of 18 U.S.C. § 1519, a "tangible object" is one used to preserve or record information and does not include, in this case, fish.
Court membership
Chief Justice John Roberts Associate Justices Antonin Scalia · Anthony Kennedy Clarence Thomas · Ruth Bader Ginsburg Stephen Breyer · Samuel Alito Sonia Sotomayor · Elena Kagan
Case opinions
Plurality	Ginsburg, joined by Roberts, Breyer, Sotomayor
Concurrence	Alito (in judgment)
Dissent	Kagan, joined by Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas
Laws applied
18 U.S.C. § 1519; Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002

Yates v. United States, 574 U.S. 528 (2015), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court construed 18 U.S.C. § 1519, a provision added to the federal criminal code by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, to criminalize the destruction or concealment of "any record, document, or tangible object" to obstruct a federal investigation.^[1] By a 5-to-4 vote, the Court stated that the term "tangible object" as used in this section means an object used to record or preserve information, and that this did not include fish.^[2]