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``The existence of law is one thing; its merit or demerit is another''.He argued that law could be studied and analyzed without recourse to the law `as it should be'. Austin gave as an example of this confusion a passage from Blackstone's Commentaries on the laws of England, the gist of which is that the `laws' of God are superior to the laws of man, and that human laws have no validity if contrary to the laws of God. Austin was at pains to point out that this what not necessarily a proposition with which he disagreed; however, the proposition mixes notions of what law is, with what it should be, to the extent that it is impossible to agree or disagree. Blackstone could have meant that the formation of human law should be guided by the principles of justice. Alternatively he could have meant that a law that was at odds with the dictates of justice were, in some way, not `laws' at all. Austin repudiated the second notion - for him, what differentiates laws from non-laws is not whether they are just or not, but whether they can be enforced or not. Because, for Austin, laws were nothing more than commands backed up with threats, he was very much concerned with questions of sovereignty. In Austin's legal theory, there had to be some entity in the position of `sovereign', that was the source, and not the subject, of the commands. In England Austin identified this source of authority as Parliament, and formed the model of ParliamentarySupremacy that is still prevalent today. More recently, writers such as HLA Hart have criticised Austin's view of `laws as commands' as being far to simplistic to explain the complexitities of modern legal systems.
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