Hands on Players...By ref

[Brick43]

I had a situation recently where I felt I needed to separate two players jawing at each other (on the same team actually) and in doing so I placed my hands on one of the players. The player immediately told me to get my hands off of him. My question is do we have the authority to place our hands on the players during the game? Is this authority only in certain situations? I just scanned through Rule 2 and didn't see anything. Any help/thoughts help would be appreciated.