Austin was born on 3 March 1790 at Creeting St Mary in today's district of Mid Suffolk, as the eldest son of a well-to-do miller.

Plagued by ill health, depression and self-doubt, Austin wrote little after the publication of his major work, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832).

Drawing heavily on the thought of Jeremy Bentham, Austin was the first legal thinker to work out a fully developed positivistic theory of law.

More precisely, laws are general commands issued by a sovereign to members of an independent political society, and backed up by credible threats of punishment or other adverse consequences ("sanctions") in the event of non-compliance.

Note that all the key concepts in this account (law, sovereign, command, sanction, duty) are defined in terms of empirically verifiable social facts.

Though Austin's brand of legal positivism was greatly influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries,[7] it is widely seen as overly simplistic today.