Austin, JOHN, was born at Creeting Mill, Suffolk, 3d March 1790; at sixteen he entered the army, and served in Sicily; but in 1818 was called to the bar. In 1820 he married Miss Sarah Taylor of Norwich (see below), and went to live in Westminster, beside Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. He was compelled by bad health to abandon his practice at the bar about the time when the university of London was founded (1826), and he then received the appointment of professor of Jurisprudence. To fit himself for the chair, he settled in 1827 at Bonn, and returned to England next year well acquainted with the writings of some of the most eminent of the continental jurists. His lectures were well received by a few distinguished men; but the subject was not recognised as a necessary branch of legal study. In the absence of students, Austin in 1832 was reluctantly compelled to resign his appointment. In the same year, he published his Province of Jurisprudence Determined, a work at the time little appreciated by the general public; in the estimation of competent judges, however, it placed its author in the highest rank among writers on jurisprudence. It dealt with the relations of ethics to law, and gave an admirable statement of utilitarianism, on which he based his system of morals. In 1833 he was appointed by Lord Brougham a member of the Criminal Law Commission. The post was not much to his taste, as he did not believe that the public received any advantage from such bodies. 'If they would give me £200 a year,' he said, 'for two years, I would shut myself up in a garret, and at the end of that time I would produce a complete map of the whole field of crime, and a draft of a criminal code.' Austin was afterwards appointed a member of a commission to inquire into the grievances of the Maltese. He returned to England in 1838, not in good health, and soon removed with his family to Germany, living at Carlsbad in summer, at Dresden and Berlin in winter. The revolution of 1848 drove him back to England, and he then settled at Weybridge, where he died in December 1859, universally respected for the dignity and magnanimity of his character. His lectures on the principles of jurisprudence were prepared for the press by his widow, and published after his death under the title of Lectures on Jurisprudence (1861-63). They and the earlier works, edited together by Mr R. Campbell, have passed through several editions.
Austin's great merit consists in his having been the first English writer who attached precise and intelligible meaning to the terms which denote the leading conceptions underlying all systems of jurisprudence. With a very perfect knowledge of the methods of Roman and English law, he displayed genius of the highest order in devising a novel system of classification for the subject-matter of his science. The work he did is incomplete, but it forms a sure foundation to future labourers in the same field. It is universally recognised as an enduring monument of learning and genius, and it entitles its author to take rank as one of the very few Englishmen who have made contributions of importance to the philosophical study of law. Austin said of himself that his special vocation was that of 'untying knots'—intellectual knots; and so it was. He set himself to the task of exposing the errors hid under the phrases and metaphors current among writers on law, and this he accomplished with such skill and subtlety as to make his works models of close and sound reasoning. See Memoir of Austin prefixed to the Lectures, and an article on Austin in Mill's Dissertations.—Mrs AUSTIN (née Sarah Taylor), translator, was born at Norwich in 1793, and married John Austin in 1820, the only child of the marriage being Lady Duff Gordon (q.v.). A faithful and devoted wife, she spent many years with her husband abroad, and enjoyed the friendship of many of the most eminent persons in continental society. Mrs Austin translated from the German, Falk's Characteristics of Goethe (1833), Carové's Story without an End (1834), Ranke's Popes (1840) and History of the Reformation in Germany (1845); from the French, M. Cousin's Report on Public Education in Prussia (1834), and Guizot's English Revolution (1850). She herself was author of a pamphlet On National Education (1839); of Germany from 1760 to 1814 (1854); and of Letters on Girls' Schools and on the Training of Working-women (1857). From 1861 to 1863 she was engaged in editing her husband's lectures from his manuscripts, a duty she discharged with very great ability. She died at Weybridge, 8th August 1867.—CHARLES AUSTIN, younger brother of John, was born in 1799, and educated at Bury and Jesus College, Cambridge. Called to the bar in 1827, and made a Queen's Counsel in 1841, he, during the railway mania, made an enormous fortune as a parliamentary lawyer, and in 1848 retired from practice. So this first of lawyers and most eloquent of Benthamites, Macaulay's rival as a conversationalist, who to Mill had seemed 'capable of dominating the world,' died, a country squire, at Brandeston Hall, in Suffolk, 21st December 1874.