Frankfurt (Oder), but had to leave after three years due to his thoroughly Liberal ideas which were disliked by King Frederick William I of Prussia. Between 1739 and 1751, he had various jobs. He spent the years 1739 to 1747 at Ebersdorf, mainly concerned with completing the monumental 53 volumes of his Deutsches Staatsrecht ("German Constitutional Law"), a pioneering research analysing the named subject matter more systematically than ever done before, and based on a through study of the sources. 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. In 1764 he was released, due in part to the intercession of Friedrich the Great of Prussia (son of the king who had hounded Moser in 1739). He 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