John Austin (3 March 1790 – 1 December 1859) was an English legal theorist, who posthumously influenced British and American law with an analytical approach to jurisprudence and a theory of
legal positivism
Legal positivism (as understood in the Anglosphere) is a school of thought of analytical jurisprudence developed largely by legal philosophers during the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. While Bentham and Austin dev ...
. Austin opposed traditional approaches of "
natural law
Natural law ( la, ius naturale, ''lex naturalis'') is a system of law based on a close observation of human nature, and based on values intrinsic to human nature that can be deduced and applied independently of positive law (the express enacte ...
", arguing against any need for connections between law and morality. Human legal systems, he claimed, can and should be studied in an empirical, value-free way.
Life and work
Austin was born on 3 March 1790 at
Creeting St Mary in today's district of
Mid Suffolk
Mid Suffolk is a local government district in Suffolk, England. Its council was based in Needham Market until late 2017, and is currently sharing offices with the Suffolk County Council in Ipswich. The largest town of Mid Suffolk is Stowmarket. ...
, as the eldest son of a well-to-do miller.
After spending five years in the army during the Napoleonic Wars, Austin turned to law, and spent seven unhappy years practising at the Chancery bar. In 1819, he married Sarah Taylor and became neighbours and close friends with
,
James and
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 – 7 May 1873) was an English philosopher, political economist, Member of Parliament (MP) and civil servant. One of the most influential thinkers in the history of classical liberalism, he contributed widely to ...
. Mainly through Bentham's influence, Austin was appointed Professor of Jurisprudence at the newly founded
London University
The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degre ...
in 1826. However, Austin's lectures were not well-attended and he resigned his university post in 1834.
Thereafter, aside from two stints on government commissions, Austin lived largely on his wife
Sarah Austin's earnings as a writer and translator. Plagued by ill health, depression and self-doubt, Austin wrote little after the publication of his major work, ''
The Province of Jurisprudence Determined'' (1832). This work was largely ignored in Austin's lifetime, but became influential after his death, when his widow published a second edition in 1861. A second book, ''Lectures on Jurisprudence'', was put together by her from Austin's notes and published in 1863.
John Austin died on 1 December 1859 in
Weybridge
Weybridge () is a town in the Borough of Elmbridge in Surrey, England, around southwest of central London. The settlement is recorded as ''Waigebrugge'' and ''Weibrugge'' in the 7th century and the name derives from a crossing point of the ...
. His only child,
Lucie
Lucie is the French and Czech form of the female name Lucia. Notable people with the name include:
Given name
* Lucie Ahl, British tennis player
* Lucie Arnaz, American actress
* Lucie Aubrac, member of the French Resistance
* Lucie Baltha ...
, later became Lady Duff-Gordon.
Legal positivism
Austin's goal was to transform law into a true science. To do this, he believed it was necessary to purge human law of all moralistic notions and to define key legal concepts in strictly empirical terms. Law, according to Austin, is a social fact and reflects relations of power and obedience. This twofold view, that (1) law and morality are separate and (2) that all human-made ("positive") laws can be traced back to human lawmakers, is known as legal positivism. Drawing heavily on the thought of Jeremy Bentham, Austin was the first legal thinker to work out a fully developed positivistic theory of law.
Austin argues that laws are rules, which he defines as a type of command. More precisely, laws are general commands issued by a sovereign to members of an independent political society, and backed up by credible threats of punishment or other adverse consequences ("sanctions") in the event of non-compliance. The sovereign in any legal system is the person or group of persons habitually obeyed by the bulk of the population, which does not habitually obey anyone else. A command is a declared wish that something should be done, issued by a superior, and accompanied by threats in the event of non-compliance. Such commands give rise to legal duties to obey. Note that all the key concepts in this account (law, sovereign, command, sanction, duty) are defined in terms of empirically verifiable social facts. No moral judgment, according to Austin, is ever necessary to determine what the law is – though of course morality must be consulted in determining what the law should be. Austin as a utilitarian believed that laws should promote the greatest happiness of society.
Criticism
Though Austin's brand of legal positivism was greatly influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it is widely seen as overly simplistic today. Critics such as
H. L. A. Hart have charged that Austin's account fails to recognize that:
* Law-making powers are dispersed in many modern societies and it is difficult to identify a "sovereign" in Austin's sense.
* Most legal systems include rules that do not impose sanctions, but empower officials or citizens to do certain things (such as drawing up wills), or specify ways that legal rules may be identified or changed.
* Those threats do not give rise to obligations. If they did, there would be no essential difference between a gunman's threat ("Your money or your life") and an ordinary piece of legislation.
[H. L. A. Hart, "Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morality", ''Harvard Law Review'', 71: 593–629 (1958).]
References
Further reading
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External links
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*Spencer about Austin's system: https://web.archive.org/web/20140202205618/http://www.constitution.org/hs/manvssta.txt a short way into essay #4
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Austin, John
19th-century British philosophers
1790 births
1859 deaths
Philosophers of law
Academics of University College London
British legal scholars
Consequentialists
Utilitarians
English legal writers
People from Creeting St Mary
Members of the Inner Temple
19th-century English writers