“Courts of justice are universally acknowledged to be vested, by their very creation, with power to impose silence, respect, and decorum, in their presence, and submission to their lawful mandates.” These powers are “governed not by rule or statute but by the control necessarily vested in courts to manage their own affairs so as to achieve the orderly and expeditious disposition of cases.” This principle, repeatedly declared by the United States Supreme Court since 1812, is a fundamental tenet of federal courts jurisprudence.2 The existence of such powers is described as being virtually self-evident. Inherent powers are those “necessary to the exercise of all others”3 and are said to derive from the “control necessarily vested in courts to manage their own affairs.”4 Yet when courts seek to apply these necessary and self-evident powers to specific legal problems, their precise nature and scope turn out to be surprisingly mysterious. The inherent powers doctrine has been called the “murkiest, and most extensive” of the federal courts’