In the latest release of the Laravel framework (v5.1.1) they've introduced authorization handling to the native framework. This allows you to integrate permissions checks and perform policy validation both on the backend and in the templates.

In addition to providing authentication services out of the box, Laravel also provides a simple way to organize authorization logic and control access to resources. There are a variety of methods and helpers to assist you in organizing your authorization logic.

The functionality includes the concepts of "abilities" (permissions, essentially) and validate the allow/deny status based on object properties, such as Users. The documentation shows how to perform the evaluations in the controllers, user model, form requests and even in the Blade templates. There's also a section on creating policies for more complex evaluations than just one-off permission checks.

To get a feel for what the community things of this new functionality, be sure to check out this Reddit thread with feedback, both positive and negative, on how it was implemented.