Johann Jacob Moser

Johann Jacob Moser (born 18 January 1701 in Stuttgart; died 30 September 1785) was an important German public law teacher.

Family

Johann Jacob Moser was a member of the Moser family of Filseck, an old and respectable Württemberg family. They were devout Protestants with a history of service as civil servants to the Duchy of Württemberg. Moser's father was Johann Jacob Moser of Filseck (born 1660 in Stuttgart, died 1716), and his mother was Helene Catharine née Misler (born 1672 in Stade, died 1741 in Stuttgart). Moser had now six brothers and sisters but his parents managed to fund his pursuit of an academic career.

In 1721 Moser married Friederike raisin Vi, daughter of a Württembergian Upper Council President. Their oldest son, Friedrich Karl von Moser, was born on 18 December 1723 in Stuttgart, and became a jurist, political writer and a statesman.

Career

Moser studied state journalism at the University of Tübingen. He was mostly self-taught and at 18 years of age he became a professor of the law faculty. However he found his income insufficient, and he so that it had to look around for other acquisition possibilities.

From 1721-1726 he worked in Vienna. In 1724 he became an adviser to the state vice-chancellor Count Schönborn. Moser was not able to pursue a career in the imperial service, because he refused to convert to Catholicism.

In 1726 Moser returned to Stuttgart as a government advisor. In 1727 he was appointed professor at the Tübingen Collegium. The job conflicted with his role as a government advisor and he quit (which job?) in 1732.

In 1736 he became a professor at the University of Frankfurt. Again, he came into conflict with colleagues and the government, and quit in 1739. Between 1739 and 1951, he had various jobs.

In 1751 Moser became a consultant on land reform to the Charles Eugene, Duke of Württemberg. He came into conflict with the Duke by opposing the Duke's absolutist tendencies. In July 1759 he was arrested and imprisoned without judicial procedure in solitary confinement in the fortress Hohentwiel, on the charge of authoring subversive writings. He completed his five-year detention with his mental and physical health and his faith in god unbroken. In order to meet his desire to write, without writing materials, he wrote religious songs on the walls with soot from the fireplace on the walls. In 1764, aged 63, he was released, in part due to the intercession of Friedrich the Great of Prussia, and was rehabilitated and restored to his position, rank and titles.

He retired on 16 July 1770 aged 69. During the next 15 years, he wrote many books. Over his entire life he wrote 500-600 books. This prolific output led sometimes to careless representations of the facts in his works.

Legacy

Johann Jacob Moser wrote the first description of the German state based not on abstract principles but on concrete legal rules and judicial decisions. He collected material and organised it systematically. Thus he argued against the deductive systems of natural law advocated by Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) and Christian Wolff (1679-1754). He gave the same treatment to international law, describing how it was actually practiced, rather than attempting to derive it from nature. Moser is considered as laying the foundations for the modern German state and positive international law.

He defended the traditional order by defending actual legal rules.

Apart from his work on state law, he was also interested in the local law of the numerous territories of the state. However, because of their great variety, he was not able to describe them with the same comprehensiveness.