AUSTIN, JOHN (179o-1859), English jurist, was born on March 3 1790. His father was the owner of flour mills at Ipswich and in the neighbourhood, and was in good circumstances. John was the eldest of five brothers. One of his brothers, Charles obtained great distinction at the bar. John Austin entered the army at a very early age, and remained in the service until 1812. He then read for the bar, was called in 1818, and joined the Norfolk circuit. He never had any large practice, and retired in 1825.
On the foundation of University College, London, in 1826, Austin was appointed to the chair of jurisprudence, but his lec tures did not begin until 1828. In the meantime he visited Heidelberg and Bonn to study German methods of legal teaching. There he made stimulating contacts with Savigny, K. J. A. Mit termaier, Niebuhr, Brandis, Schlegel and others. His class at University College was never a large one, but included a number of brilliant men: Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Charles Buller, Charles Villiers, Sir Samuel Romilly, and his brother, Lord Romilly, Edward Strutt (afterwards Lord Belper), Sir William Erle and John Stuart Mill. All of these have left on record ex pressions of the profound admiration which the lectures excited in the minds of those who heard them. But in 1832 Austin resigned for financial reasons, as he could not afford to live in London. In that year he published his Province of Jurisprudence determined, being the first ten of his delivered lectures compressed into six.
In 1833 Austin became a member of the royal commission on the criminal law and procedure. It appears from some notes made at the time that Austin, though he thought it his duty to sign the report (1834), strongly objected to some passages which it con tained. It appears from the nature of these objections that noth ing would have satisfied him short of a complete recasting of the criminal law.
In 1834 Austin gave a tew lectures on the "General Principles of Jurisprudence and International Law," at the Inner Temple. He then went to live with his wife (née Sarah Taylor) and only child Lucie (afterwards Lady Duff-Gordon), at Boulogne. The Austins were in Malta, where Austin was on a government in quiry, from 1837-38. After their return they lived a good deal abroad, and in 1844 they settled in Paris, where they remained until driven out of France by the Revolution of 1848. They then took a house at Weybridge, and there Austin remained until his death in Dec. 1859.
In 1842 Austin published in the Edinburgh Review an attack upon Friedrich List's system of trade protection (Das nationale System der politischen Oekonomie). His pamphlet "A Plea for the Constitution" (18S9) was a reply to Lord Grey's essay on "Parliamentary Government," and expressed Austin's view that the consequences to be anticipated from parliamentary reform were all of them either impossible of realization or mischievous. He thought that political power was safest in the hands of those possessed of hereditary or acquired property; and that without property even intelligence and knowledge afforded no presump tion of political capacity.
Austin's first published lectures were almost forgotten when Mr. (afterwards Sir Henry) Maine began to lecture on jurispru dence at the Inner Temple. Both in his private and public lectures Maine constantly urged upon his hearers the importance of Aus tin's analytical inquiries into the meaning of legal terms. He used to say that it was Austin's inquiries which had made a philosophy of law possible. Undoubtedly Maine's influence revived for a short time the interest in Austin's teaching. Maine was lecturing about the time of Austin's death, and in 1861 Mrs. Austin pub lished a second edition of the Province of Jurisprudence, and this was followed by two volumes which contained other fragments (Lectures on Jurisprudence; or the Philosophy of Positive Law).
Austin proposed to distinguish law from morals ; to explain the notions which have been entertained of duty, right, liberty, injury, punishment and redress; and their connection with, and relations to, sovereignty; to examine the distinction between rights in rem and rights in personam, and between rights ex contractu and rights ex delicto; and further to determine the meaning of such terms as right, obligation, injury, sanction, person, thing, act and forbearance.
The Lectures on Jurisprudence were reviewed by J. S. Mill in the Edinburgh Review of Oct. 1863, and this review is republished in Mill's Dissertations and Discussions, vol. iii., p. 206. Professor Jethro Brown published (1906) an edition of Austin's earlier lectures, in which they are stated in an abbreviated form. There is a sketch of his life by his widow in the preface to the Lectures on Jurisprudence, which she published after his death.