Cite as: 523 U. S. 155 (1998)
Opinion of the Court
We concede at the outset the Government's claim that the two statutes cover different forms of behavior. The federal second-degree murder statute covers a wide range of conduct; the Louisiana first-degree murder provision focuses upon a narrower (and different) range of conduct. We also concede that, other things being equal, this consideration argues in favor of assimilation. Yet other things are not equal; and other features of the federal statute convince us that Congress has intended that the federal murder statute preclude application of a first-degree murder statute such as Louisiana's to a killing on a federal enclave.
The most obvious such feature is the detailed manner in which the federal murder statute is drafted. It purports to make criminal a particular form of wrongful behavior, namely, "murder," which it defines as "the unlawful killing of a human being with malice aforethought." It covers all variants of murder. It divides murderous behavior into two parts: a specifically defined list of "first-degree" murders and all "other" murders, which it labels "second-degree." This fact, the way in which "first-degree" and "second-degree" provisions are linguistically interwoven; the fact that the "first-degree" list is detailed; and the fact that the list sets forth several circumstances at the same level of generality as does Louisiana's statute, taken together, indicate that Congress intended its statute to cover a particular field— namely, "unlawful killing of a human being with malice afore-thought"—as an integrated whole. The complete coverage of the federal statute over all types of federal enclave murder is reinforced by the extreme breadth of the possible sentences, ranging all the way from any term of years, to death. There is no gap for Louisiana's statute to fill.
Several other circumstances offer support for the conclusion that Congress' omissions from its "first-degree" murder list reflect a considered legislative judgment. Congress, for example, has recently focused directly several times upon the content of the "first-degree" list, subtracting certain speci-
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