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Austin brilliant and successful Charles Austin said: 'John is much cleverer than I, but he is always knocking his head against principles.' He found for his teaching no appreciative public. When first published his 'Province of Jurisprudence' was little noticed. The hope expressed in one of his lectures that laymen would come to take an interest in jurisprudence was crushed by his failure to procure the attention even of lawyers.

Abroad he was, and still is, little known. His name is not found in such a work as 'Holtzendorff's Rechts-Lexicon,' which contains notices of almost every obscure mediæval jurist; and German jurists still confound law proper with morality, as if he had never written. It is doubtful whether he even made in the last forty-two years of his life, by his profession, by his pen, or as a lecturer, a hundred pounds. The end of his life was, to use his wife's words, one of obscure and honourable poverty. There is no reason, however, to lay the blame of this neglect solely upon an inappreciative generation. He was not well equipped for active work. Outwardly austere, he had also a softness of nature which unfitted him for the battle of life. His friend, John Stuart Mill, who has sketched his character with kindly but truthful touches, points out one signal weakness when he says: 'The strength of will of which his manner seemed to give such strong assurance expended itself principally in manner. He spent so much time and exertion on superfluous study and thought that, when his work ought to have been completed, he had generally worked himself into an illness without having finished what he undertook.' His style, too, militated against him. It was clear, and occasionally eloquent; but it abounded in repetitions and amplifications which, however suitable in an instrument settled by an equity draftsman, were repulsive even to intelligent readers. Though a brilliant talker — Macaulay said that he scarcely knew his superior — he wrote in a manner which repelled and disheartened even his admirers. In some respects his labours have been as successful as he could have desired. He helped to revolutionise jurisprudence. He found it, in spite of Hobbes's and of Bentham's labours, an undigested mass of loose theories and vague terminology. The late Mr. Phillimore, speaking of the terminology used by English lawyers, compares it with too much appropriateness to 'the gabble of bushmen in a craal.' Austin introduced exactness of thought and expression. He gave to such terms as 'law,' 'status,' 'sovereignty,' a degree of precision unknown before. He clearly distinguished law proper from objects to which, by metaphor or analogy, it is extended. He showed the relation of custom to law. He described the nature of judicial legislation and its disadvantages without repeating Bentham's exaggerated vituperation. Not the least of Austin's services is that he gave a great impetus to the work of codification. It is inaccurate to speak of his main doctrines as truisms. The best proof of this is that they are still unknown to, or opposed by, the chief jurists of Germany and France. A reaction against his teaching has, it is true, begun. Sir Henry Maine and other students of law from its historical side have criticised his conception of law — general commands of a superior enforced by sanctions — as inapplicable to much that should form part of jurisprudence; and the tendency is to extend that science beyond positive law, to which he would confine it. It is said that he did not take sufficient account of the genesis of law. He confined the domain of positive law to 'law set by a sovereign body of persons, to a member of the independent political society wherein that person or body is sovereign or supreme.' Having regard to Austin's definitions of sovereign and political society, it is often objected that he would exclude from jurisprudence law as known in all barbarous and semi-barbarous and not a few civilised societies. It is also urged that his account of customary law as being either positive morality or law properly so called, only by reason of its being the command of the sovereign, is violently at variance with facts. There is not universal agreement as to the accuracy of his criticisms on the classification of Gains and Justinian, It is often also objected that he who sought to confine jurisprudence to its true domain too frequently diverges into the region of politics, religion, or ethics. But his work has stood remarkably well the test of criticism. The majority of the objections to Austin's method and conclusions come to little more than a contention that jurisprudence may with advantage be studied historically as well as analytically, and that a large class of facts excluded by his definition from that science must always have especial interest for the jurist.

[Austin's Introduction to Lectures on Jurisprudence; Mill's Autobiography; Parliamentary Papers for 1839, vol, xvii.; Times 12 Aug. 1867; Mrs, Ross's Preface to Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt.]  AUSTIN, ROBERT, D.D., (fl. 1644), puritan divine, published in 1644 a tract, entitled 'Allegiance not impeached, viz. by the Parliament's taking up of Arms (though