Sooner or later, most of us who drive receive a ticket for a traffic violation. When stopped, we may insist that we didn’t intend to speed or roll through the stop sign or whatever, but we don’t expect the officer to accept our lack of intent as a valid reason to break the law. In fact, most of us accept that governing units have the right to establish traffic rules within their boundaries and to place law enforcement personnel on their streets to enforce those rules.

            Of course, it would be a whole different story if the person issuing the ticket was not wearing a uniform, displaying a badge and driving an official vehicle. Without those symbols of office, we would not automatically recognize the individual’s ticket-writing authority.

            In other words, police officers’ authority to enforce the law is a derived authority, not one they possess by virtue of their personhood. They have the right to make traffic stops only because the governing unit that employs them has duly authorized and empowered them to perform this function. Likewise, that governing unit has the right to authorize its officers only because it is a legal entity duly organized under the laws of the state in which it sits, which in turn has been legally sanctioned under the Constitution of the United States. And that authority exists because the majority of “we the people” have together consented to it.

            The opposite of derived authority is direct authority, where a person has a certain power simply by virtue of who he or she is, but there are not many examples of it. Legend has it that when Henry Ford II was challenged on certain decisions by people who worked for him, he would sometimes say, “We’ll do it that way because it’s my name that’s on the building.” So within his realm, Ford had direct authority, though that was no guarantee his decisions were right. For centuries, kings of various lands claimed to rule by divine righ

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