Definition
In legal practice, authorities are the sources cited by counsel or a court in support of a legal proposition — statutes, judicial decisions, constitutional provisions, administrative rules, treatises, and other legal texts marshaled to establish what the law is or requires. The term operates on two levels:
1. Cited authorities: The specific sources — cases, statutes, regulations, treatises, law review articles — referenced in briefs, oral argument, or judicial opinions to support a stated rule or conclusion of law.
2. Legal authority (the underlying concept): The binding or persuasive force that a source carries in a given legal context. A decision from the jurisdiction's highest court is mandatory authority; a decision from another jurisdiction is persuasive authority. The weight accorded to any citation depends on its source, age, jurisdiction, and the tribunal receiving it.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of authority — those who hold power or official command; governing bodies or officials.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Persons or bodies exercising power; also, a book or passage accepted as a reliable source of information.
The gap matters. In everyday speech, "the authorities" almost always means law enforcement or government officials — people with power. In legal practice, "the authorities" means sources of law: the cases and statutes a lawyer cites. A brief writer asking for "all relevant authorities" is asking for legal sources, not officials. Researchers encountering this term in historical legal documents should read context carefully before assuming either meaning.
Common Confusion
Authorities (cited sources) should not be conflated with authority (legal power or jurisdiction). The former is a research and advocacy concept; the latter is a constitutional and administrative law concept. Historical legal texts, including Bouvier's and Burrill's, sometimes slide between these meanings within a single entry. Additionally, the hierarchy among authorities — mandatory versus persuasive, primary versus secondary — is a distinct analytical framework that researchers will find treated under separate headings in most modern references.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Primary authorities: Constitutions, statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions — sources that themselves constitute the law.
Secondary authorities: Treatises, law review articles, Restatements, practice guides, and legal encyclopedias — sources that explain, synthesize, or comment on primary law. These carry persuasive weight only.
Mandatory (binding) authority: Primary authority from the controlling jurisdiction that a court must follow.
Persuasive authority: Any authority — from another jurisdiction, a lower court, or a secondary source — that a court may consider but is not obligated to follow.
Why It Matters in Research
The word "authorities" in historical legal sources is a compression of an entire research methodology. When Bouvier says enactments and opinions are "relied upon as establishing or declaring the rule of law," he is describing the adversarial citation system — the same system researchers use today, but with a meaningfully different canon of sources.
Several traps appear in historical research:
First, the weight of secondary authorities has shifted dramatically. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, treatise writers like Blackstone, Kent, and Story were cited as authorities in court with a weight approaching that of decided cases. Modern courts treat treatises as persuasive at best. A historical brief loaded with "authorities" from Coke or Story is not weak by the standards of its era.
Second, the distinction between mandatory and persuasive authority was less formalized before the modern appellate structure solidified in the late nineteenth century. Researchers should not read modern hierarchy back onto colonial or early federal sources.
Third, in older English sources and some early American texts, "authorities" can refer specifically to prior case decisions to the near-exclusion of statutes. The statutory revolution of the twentieth century shifted the center of gravity; primary legal research today leads with statutes and regulations, then cases. That ordering was often reversed in the common law tradition.
Fourth, when researching across the Law Mind corpus, be alert to entries under cognate terms — "authority," "precedent," "stare decisis," "citation" — which often contain material logically belonging under "authorities" but filed elsewhere due to indexing choices of individual dictionary compilers.
Historical Dictionary Support
The four source dictionaries converge on a consistent core: authorities are citations to statutes, decided cases, and legal text-writers, presented to a court in support of a legal position. Black's (both editions) and Burrill's are nearly identical in formulation. Bouvier adds the more analytical point that authorities have a "relative weight" and should be accorded precedence in a stated order — though Bouvier's entry as excerpted does not complete that hierarchy, a limitation researchers should note.
What the historical dictionaries do not address: the mandatory/persuasive distinction, the rise of administrative and regulatory authority as a primary source category, and the transformation of secondary sources (particularly the Restatements and model codes) into quasi-authoritative reference points. None of these developments were visible to nineteenth-century compilers. Researchers treating these dictionaries as complete accounts of the authorities concept will need to supplement heavily with modern sources.
Bouvier's observation that the opinion of a court, counsel, or text-writer "is usually fortified by a citation of authorities" reflects the layered nature of legal argument — the recognition that assertion without citation carries reduced force — a principle as operative today as in 1839.
Jurisdictional Note
The weight assigned to various categories of authority varies by jurisdiction. In federal courts, circuit decisions bind district courts within the circuit but not courts in other circuits. Many state courts follow similar intra-jurisdictional hierarchy rules, but the treatment of sister-state decisions, federal court pronouncements on state law, and Restatement sections differs significantly across state systems.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Commander-in-Chief Power and Military Authority (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia) — relevant for the distinct concept of governmental authority, particularly where questions of institutional power and its legal sources intersect with the citation of constitutional authorities.