Authority (disambiguation)
# Authority (disambiguation)

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 (Southern Reach Trilogy), a 2014 book by Jeff VanderMeer, the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy
* The Authority (comics), superhero comic book published by DC Comics, under the Wildstorm imprint, debuting in 1999
* The Authority, His Dark Materials character who debuts in the 2000 novel The Amber Spyglass
* 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
