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Systems of law usually establish a hierarchy of norms based on the particular source from which the norms derive. In national legal systems, it is commonplace for the fundamental values of society to be given constitutional status and afforded precedence in the event of a conflict with norms enacted by legislation or adopted by administrative regulation; administrative rules themselves must conform to legislative mandates, while written law usually takes precedence over unwritten law and legal norms prevail over nonlegal (political or moral) rules. Norms of equal status must be balanced and reconciled to the extent possible. The mode of legal reasoning applied in practice is thus naturally hierarchical, establishing relationships and order between normative statements and levels of authority.

When Sulaiman Al-Adsani traveled from the United Kingdom to Kuwait to repel Saddam Hussein's invasion in 1991, he never dreamed he would depart with bruises and burns inflicted by the very government he had sought to defend. According to Al-Adsani, his troubles began when he was accused of releasing sexual videotapes of Sheikh Jaber Al-Sabah Al-Saud Al-Sabah, a relative of the emir of Kuwait, into general circulation. After the first Gulf war, with the aid of government troops, the sheikh exacted his revenge by breaking into Al-Adsani's house, beating him, and transporting him to a Kuwaiti state prison, where his beatings continued for days. Al-Adsani was subsequently taken at gunpoint in a government car to the palace of the emir's brother, where his ordeal intensified. According to Al-Adsani, his head was repeatedly submerged in a swimming pool filled with corpses and his body was badly burned when he was forced into a small room where the sheikh set fire to gasoline-soaked mattresses.

The problem of legal force and the hierarchy of normative legal acts must be considered at the intersection of political and legal knowledge, since such acts are not just a form of external consolidation of legal norms prescribing a certain model of behavior to the subject, but also express the state-power will, fix the institutional and political framework and the alignment of political forces in society. In the history of political and legal thought, two main ways of substantiating the legal force of normative legal acts have taken shape: normative and subject-political. The most consistently and argumentatively indicated methods are set out in the theoretical works of German lawyers of the last century, Hans Kelsen and Karl Schmitt. The article proposes to compare the views of thinkers on the nature of legal force and the hierarchy of normative legal acts. In the final part of the work, a variant of a conciliatory interpretation of competing approaches is substantiated, and conclusions are drawn about the relative practical significance of the analyzed theoretical models in the context of legal practice and the political process.

According to social dominance theory, intergroup dynamics are strongly influenced by the social positions which individuals hold in society. Several studies suggest that holding a position of power can, sometimes automatically, generate negative attitudes and hostile behaviors toward subordinate social groups. However, at present, the studies carried out on these effects of power have not taken into account the influence of the normative context. Based on the distinction made by Sidanius and Pratto between "hierarchy‐enhancing" (HE) vs. "hierarchy‐attenuating" (HA) environments, this study examines if the effects of power on legitimizing cognitions vary as a function of the normative environment. A laboratory study and a study conducted in a natural environment confirm our hypothesis that individuals holding a powerful or dominant social role in a HE setting differ significantly from individuals holding an equally powerful role in a HA setting. The effects of power observed in past research probably resulted from studying power in hierarchy‐enhancing environments, but not in hierarchy‐attenuating ones.