John Austin

Life and ideas

John Austin was an English barrister who became the first professor of jurisprudence at the new University of London in 1826 and went to study in Germany before beginning to lecture. His lectures were published in 1832 as The Province of Jurisprudence Determined. Following Bentham, he defined a law as a command of a sovereign, a person or body that people habitually obey and that obeys no one, and which is backed by a threat of harm. Positive law, the law that actually exists, should be kept apart from morality and from the laws of God, and whether a law is unjust does not affect its existence. His lectures attracted few students and he lived in modest circumstances, but his clear and rigid theory became the standard target of later jurists, and H.L.A. Hart's account of its failings in The Concept of Law set modern positivism on a new course.