Eduard Herbst (9 December 1820 – 25 June 1892) was an Austrian jurist and politician. He served as Minister of Justice in the "Citizens' Ministry" of Cisleithania from 1867 to 1870.
Czech cartoon of Eduard Herbst blindly crossing over the Bohemian Lion (1881)
As such, he introduced a number of important reforms—among them the abolition of imprisonment for debt, the introduction of the jury in libel suits against the press, the organization of the district courts, important finance measures, and, above all, the confessional ordinances of 1868. Herbst retained his office under Auersperg's successor Eduard Taaffe, with whom he fell out in 1870, when he sided with Education Minister Leopold Hasner von Artha against Taaffe's federalist policies; he and Hasner resigned on April 4.
His party lost its control of the government, and he led the German liberal opposition in the Reichsrat in its attacks on the cabinets of Alfred Jozef Potocki and Karl Sigmund von Hohenwart. The fall of the latter, in October 1871, brought the Constitutional Party more into power, when Herbst became a leader of the government forces in the Austrian Lower House. He remained an advocate of centralist German-Liberal politics and stood out as an opponent of the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878. In the latter years of his life, however, during the second cabinet of Minister-president Taaffe from 1879 onwards, Herbst lost much of his former influence because of a split in his former compact party.
Herbst also was a profound legal academic. Among his writings may be mentioned his Handbuch des österreichischen Strafrechts (7th edition, 1882–84).
