John Austin

John Austin (born March 3, 1790, Creeting Mill, Suffolk, Eng.—died December 1859, Weybridge, Surrey) was an 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.

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Philosophy of law: John Austin

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.

Legacy

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.

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