The phrase "prevailing authority" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it to refer to a group or person who has control over a given situation. For example, "The prevailing authority on the town council decided that the ordinance must be approved."
Each entry is an avatar of outrage over the depredations of power against its multifarious victims, those rendered helpless by poverty, religion, race, sexual identity or — as in the vignettes about Galileo and Isaac Babel — the simple accident of being right when the truth defined by the prevailing authority was wrong.
Paul now wished to communicate his desire that they should submit to the prevailing authority of the state.
But I think there's something else going on, something that resonates both with some of the high lines of modern history and with the tone of the times (and that the latter is one of the things to which its success with young readers is, in part, due): in order to lead a revolution against the prevailing authorities, you first have to win at their game.
In his view, it's an umbrella label, "a way to define a range of phenomena involving young people that, to the prevailing adult authorities, seemed to represent a falling short, a delinquency, in youthful behavior.
Health sector reform involves changing the prevailing patterns of authority and power.
And that agenda continues to be the prevailing moral authority in the nation.
"The tragedy here is that artists (and yes, I consider comedians artists — some more gifted than others) are being confronted for doing precisely what their function in society is, and has always been: challenge authority, question prevailing attitudes and mores, and tap specifically into perspectives that are not necessarily 'acceptable' to voice".
Having spent more than 10 years as a staff attorney in that office, I can say with some authority that the prevailing view within the Justice Department is that the pardon attorney's sole institutional function is to defend the department's prosecutorial prerogatives...
Having spent more than 10 years as a staff attorney in that office, I can say with some authority that the prevailing view within the Justice Department is that the pardon attorney's sole institutional function is to defend the department's prosecutorial prerogatives.
Notwithstanding the prevailing lip service, the Palestinian Authority has not crossed the bridge to make this concession.
Medical authority is conceived differently in this region such that Arab patients tend to automatically defer to the doctor's authority, challenging the prevailing patient-centered health models promoted in Western societies.
