Austin John

Austin, John, the eminent English jurist, was born in Suffolk in 1790. He served for five years in the army, and then was called to the bar in 1818. He read much with John Stuart Mill. He soon retired from the active exercise of his profession, for which, in spite of wide knowledge, great intellect, and wonderful clearness of expression, he was constitutionally unfitted, and in 1828 entered upon the duties of Professor of Jurisprudence at University College. His lectures at first drew large audiences, but the interest gradually died out and in 1835 he vacated the chair. He had in the meantime published his great work, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, in which he swept away a mass of confusion that had hitherto obscured legal ideas. He served on the Criminal Law Commission, lectured at the Inner Temple without much success, and 1836 accompanied George Cornewall Lewis to Malta to assist in an inquiry into the grievances of the native population. With health enfeebled and spirits broken he retired for four years into Germany, and spent a like period in Paris. Coming home in 1848 he settled at Weybridge, where he died in 1859. Except a few articles in the Edinburgh Review he wrote little during the last twenty years of his life. His widow published his Lectures on Jurisprudence after his death.