ABSTRACT
John Austin (1790-1859), the first professor of jurisprudence at London University, and a friend of Bentham and JS Mill, was a positivist scholar who, in The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832), attempted to ascertain the general limits of jurisprudence. All that now remains of his legacy of legal thought is a much-criticised concept of law as ‘a species of command’, and an analysis of sovereignty. His theories were widely condemned because his critics felt that he had not understood the significance of the social functions of law and had failed to separate the concepts of legal authority and political power in his work. Hart demolished the essence of this theory in The Concept of Law (1961). Austin remains, nevertheless, a figure of significance in any account of the historical development of positivist jurisprudence.
