John Austin was an English legal theorist who posthumously influenced British and American law with an analytical approach to jurisprudence and a theory of legal positivism. Austin opposed traditional approaches of "natural law", arguing against any need for connections between law and morality. Human legal systems, he claimed, can and should be studied in an empirical, value-free way.

Legal positivism is a school of thought of philosophy of law and jurisprudence which holds that law is constructed from social facts, without regards to the merits of such law. It was developed largely by legal philosophers during the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Austin. While Bentham and Austin developed legal positivist theory, empiricism provided the theoretical basis for such developments to occur. Some of the most prominent legal positivist writers of the 20th century have been Hans Kelsen, H. L. A. Hart, and Joseph Raz.