Death of Inherent Judicial Authority Exaggerated?

Is inherent authority—at least in terms of ordering sanctions for the loss or destruction of electronically-stored information—dead?

Practitioners can’t be completely confident that they’ve seen the last of inherent authority, even though it certainly seemed to be on life support during and after the crafting of the 2015 amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.

The Advisory Note to Rule 37(e), which governs how and when a court can issue sanctions for failure to preserve ESI and which sanctions it can issue, says that Rule 37(e), “forecloses reliance on inherent authority or state law to determine when certain measures should be ...