// Workers AI · dad joke modeWhat did authority say to its friend? You're under my control.

Authority is the power to command.

Authority or The Authority may also refer to:

Arts, entertainment, and media

• Authority (album), a 2014 album by British electronic music group Client
• "Authority" (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit), a ninth-season episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
• Authority (novel), a 2014 book by Jeff VanderMeer, the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy
• Authority (essay collection), a 2025 book of literary criticism by Andrea Long Chu
• The Authority (comics), superhero comic book published by DC Comics, under the Wildstorm imprint, debuting in 1999
• The Authority (His Dark Materials), His Dark Materials character who debuts in the 2000 novel The Amber Spyglass
• "The Authority" (The Amazing World of Gumball), a second-season episode of The Amazing World of Gumball
• The Authority, used by the autonomous council of vampire hierarchs in The Southern Vampire Mysteries novels and the TV series True Blood based on the novels

Internet

• Authority, a grading of a blog's worthiness, used by Technorati
• Authority, one of two scores assigned by the HITS algorithm, a scheme used for ranking web pages (also known as hubs and authorities)

Law

• Legal authority, a right or permission to do something
  • Legal authority to arrest someone, known as the power of arrest
• Authority, one of the sources of law in a particular legal system
  • Primary authority
  • Secondary authority
• Authority in the law of agency, the ability of an agent to legally bind a principal
  • Apparent authority
  • Actual authority
• Rational-legal authority, a sociological concept

Organizations

• High Authority (disambiguation), any of several executive organizations or branches
• Palestinian National Authority, the administrative organization established to govern the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a consequence of the 1994 Oslo Accords
• Police authority (UK), a body charged with securing efficient and effective control of a territorial police area
• Public authority, a government-chartered corporation such as a transit authority
• The Authority (professional wrestling), a faction in WWE created by Triple H and Stephanie McMahon

Other uses

• Authority (management), formal or legitimate, specified in a charter
• Authority (sociology), the legitimate or socially approved use of power
• Authority (textual criticism), a text's reliability as a witness to the author's intentions
• Appeal to authority, a type of argument in logic
• Authority control, in library and information science, standardization of the names of entities
• Taxonomic authority, the scientist who first validly published a taxon name

See also

• Authoritarian personality, influential theory, developed in a 1950 book, by several UC Berkeley psychologists
• Authoritarianism, describes a form of government characterized by an emphasis on the authority of the state in a republic or union