John Austin was born. March 3, 1790, Creeting Mill,
Suffolk, Eng.--d. December 1859,
Weybridge, Surrey), English jurist whose writings,
especially The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832), advocated
a definition of law as a species of command and sought to distinguish positive
law from morality. He had little influence during his lifetime outside
the circle
of Utilitarian supporters of Jeremy Bentham. His authority
came posthumously.
Life
Austin began to study law in 1812 after five years in the army and from
1818 to 1825 practiced unsuccessfully at the chancery bar. His powers
of rigorous analysis and his uncompromising intellectual honesty deeply
impressed his contemporaries, and in 1826, when University College,
London, was founded, he was appointed its first professor of
jurisprudence, a subject that had previously occupied an unimportant
place in legal studies. He spent the next two years in Germany studying
Roman law and the work of German experts on modern civil law whose
ideas of classification and systematic analysis exerted an influence on
him
second only to that of Bentham. Both Austin and his wife, Sarah, were
ardent Utilitarians, intimate friends of Bentham and of James and John
Stuart Mill, and much concerned with legal reform. Austin's first lectures,
in 1828, were attended by many distinguished men, but he failed to
attract students and resigned his chair in 1832. In 1834, after delivering
a
shorter but equally unsuccessful version of his lectures, he abandoned
the
teaching of jurisprudence. He was appointed to the Criminal Law
Commission in 1833 but, finding little support for his opinions, resigned
in
frustration after signing its first two reports. In 1836 he was appointed
a
commissioner on the affairs of Malta. The Austins then lived abroad,
chiefly in Paris, until 1848, when they settled in Surrey, where Austin
died in 1859.
Work
Austin's best known work, a version of part of his lectures,
is The
Province of Jurisprudence Determined, published in 1832. Here, in
order to clarify the distinction between law and morality, which he
considered to be blurred by doctrines of Natural Law, he elaborated his
definition of law as a species of command. According to Austin,
commands are expressions of desire that another shall do or forbear from
some act and are accompanied by a threat of punishment (the "sanction")
for disobedience. Commands are laws "simply and properly so-called"
when they prescribe courses of conduct, not specific acts, and are "set"
by the "sovereign" (i.e., the person or persons to whom a society renders
habitual obedience and who render no such obedience to others). This is
the mark distinguishing "positive law" both from the fundamental
principles of morality, which are the "law of God," and from "positive
morality," or manmade rules of conduct, such as etiquette, conventional
morality, and international law, which do not emanate from a sovereign.
The Province also contains a version of Utilitarianism in which
"utility" is
regarded as the index of God's commands and the test of the moral
quality of general rules of conduct rather than of particular actions.
Austin viewed the doctrines in The Province as "merely prefatory"
to
the study that he termed "general jurisprudence": the exposition and
analysis of the fundamental notions forming the framework of all mature
legal systems. He devoted the main part of his lectures (published in
1863) to an analysis of such "pervading notions" as those of right, duty,
persons, status, delict, and sources of law. Austin distinguished this
general, or analytical, jurisprudence from the criticism of legal institutions,
which he called the "science of legislation"; he thought both were
important parts of legal education.
Assessment
Bouts of nervous illness and self-distrust prevented Austin from fully
utilizing his great powers; his life, as his widow wrote, was one of
"unbroken disappointment and failure," in ironic contrast with his
posthumous fame and influence. A long succession of English writers
have echoed or elaborated his doctrines or, when opposing them, have
accepted his conception of the analysis of legal concepts as the central
concern of jurisprudence. In the United States jurists such as J.C. Gray
and Oliver Wendell Holmes welcomed his bold distinction between law
and morality as a major clarification.
The reaction to Austin's work at the turn of the century was severe. His
command theory was condemned as a misidentification of all law with the
product of legislation and a distortion of many types of legal rule. The
severance of a purely analytical jurisprudence from moral criticism of
law
was criticized as sterile verbalism obscuring the social function of law
and
the judicial process. Some critics consider that Austin's doctrine of
sovereignty confuses the ideas of legal authority and political power;
others hold "legal positivism" responsible for subservience to state
tyranny or absolutism.
Some of these criticisms are well founded, but even so Austin's work is
of permanent value. The rigour and clarity of his analysis have
demonstrated the complexity of many important legal and political
concepts and the perennial need for just such an analytical study as he
proposed, and repeated efforts to show precisely where his simple
distinctions between law and morality are wrong have increased the
understanding of both.
(H.L.A.H.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY.
John Stuart Mill, "Austin on Jurisprudence," in Dissertations and
Discussions, vol. 4, pp. 157-226 (1874); R.A. Eastwood and G.W.
Keeton, The Austinian Theories of Law and Sovereignty (1929);
E.M. Campbell, John Austin and Jurisprudence in Nineteenth
Century England (1959).
Related Spectrum Categories
Historical survey of legal theories from the ancient world to the 20th
century
To cite this page:
"Austin, John" Britannica Online.