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non-compliance. The sovereign in any legal system is the person or group of persons habitually obeyed by the bulk of the population, which does not habitually obey anyone else. A command is a declared wish that something should be done, issued by a superior, and accompanied by threats in the event of non-compliance. Such commands give rise to legal duties to obey. Note that all the key concepts in this account (law, sovereign, command, sanction, duty) are defined in terms of empirically verifiable social facts. No moral judgment, according to Austin, is ever necessary to determine what the law is – though of course morality must be consulted in determining what the law should be. Austin, as a utilitarian, believed that laws should promote the greatest happiness of society.
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twofold view, that (1) law and morality are separate and (2) that all human-made ("positive") laws can be traced back to human lawmakers, is known as legal positivism. Drawing heavily on the thought of Jeremy
Bentham, Austin was the first legal thinker to work out a fully developed positivistic theory of law.
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Austin's goal was to transform law into a true science. To do this, he believed it was necessary to purge human law of all moralistic notions and to define key legal concepts in strictly empirical terms. Law, according to Austin, is a social fact and reflects relations of power and obedience. This
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Austin argues that laws are rules, which he defines as a type of command. 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
244:, whereas Ker's interest came from concerns about the quality of statutes and the difficulty drafting legislation Finding the work congenial and little support in his opinions, in 1836, Austin resigned after signing two reports and was replaced by barrister
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After spending five years in the army during the
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Most legal systems include rules that do not impose sanctions, but empower officials or citizens to do certain things (such as drawing up wills), or specify ways that legal rules may be identified or changed.
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Those threats do not give rise to obligations. If they did, there would be no essential difference between a gunman's threat ("Your money or your life") and an ordinary piece of legislation.
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Though Austin's brand of legal positivism was greatly influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it is widely seen as overly simplistic today. Critics such as
213:(1832). This work was largely ignored in Austin's lifetime, but became influential after his death, when his widow published a second edition in 1861. A second book,
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in July 1827. However, Austin's lectures were not well-attended and he resigned his university post in 1834.
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have charged that Austin's account fails to recognize that:
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to consolidate existing statutes of criminal law into an
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47:Born
963:Raz
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