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Jurists

Johann Jakob Moser

Natural Law and International Law Founders

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Johann Jakob Moser was a German jurist and prolific legal writer who lived from 1701 to 1785, born and later dying in Stuttgart. Known as the father of German constitutional law, he held academic positions at the universities of Tubingen, Vienna and Frankfurt an der Oder and also served in various administrative roles. Moser became a professor of law while still a teenager and went on to author several hundred works, but he was imprisoned without trial for five years, from 1759 to 1764, at the Hohentwiel fortress for writings critical of absolutist rule, and was released and rehabilitated only after Frederick the Great intervened. His central contribution was a descriptive rather than theoretical approach to law, analyzing how legal rules and judicial decisions actually functioned in practice rather than deriving law from abstract natural-law principles, which laid groundwork for a positive approach to international law.

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