Hierarchy of values is a concept in US legal analysis that

Yale Law School Yale Law School (YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824. The 2020–21 acceptance rate was 4%, the lowest of any law school in the United ...

and

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Professor Myres McDougal popularized. It refers to an ordered list of social values that influence judicial decision-making. Different jurists or legal analysts may order values in different hierarchies, which leads them to decide particular controversies differently. One jurist may value predictability and certainty of expectation very highly and value fine-tuning the result to the equities of the individual case somewhat lower, while another might order these values in the other direction. Accordingly, in a given case one jurist might well reach a result contrary to that which the other jurist reached.

Examples

A 2002 study group concluded that "there was no well-developed and authoritative hierarchy of values in international law." An example of a value hierarchy in the sense that MacDougal uses it is found in

Paideia ''Paideia'' ( /paɪˈdeɪə/; also spelled ''paedeia''; ) referred to the rearing and education of the ideal member of the ancient Greek polis or state. These educational ideals later spread to the Greco-Roman world at large, and were called ''h ...

Abraham Maslow Abraham Harold Maslow ( ; April 1, 1908 – June 8, 1970) was an American psychologist who created Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actua ...

created a table of two columns of opposing value hierarchies, supposedly reflecting competing social paradigms.Se
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References

{{Reflist Law of the United States