Austrian statesman who served as imperial minister of the interior; he was the principal author of the February Patent (1861), which provided the first period of sustained constitutional government for the Habsburg Empire.

An opponent of the conservative regime of Prince Metternich, which was toppled in the Revolution of 1848, Schmerling was dispatched to Frankfurt as imperial representative to the preliminary diet of the German Confederation, which was a short-lived attempt to unite all German lands. He was subsequently elected to the newly established German National Assembly in Frankfurt, where he served briefly and nominally as minister of the interior and later as minister president. With the attempt at confederation a failure, Schmerling left the assembly in April 1849. Back in Vienna, he was appointed imperial minister of justice in July and began a program of judicial reform. With the return of governmental absolutism in Austria, however, he resigned his office (1851).

Called to head the ministry of the interior in December 1860 to formulate a workable constitutional plan for the empire, Schmerling devised a charter (the February Patent) that established a bicameral imperial legislature (Reichsrat) in 1861; but it was a body that was weighted in favour of the German-speaking Austrians. With the boycott of the Reichsrat—contemptuously dubbed “Schmerling's theatre”—by non-German nationalities, the constitutional experiment foundered, and he finally resigned in July 1865. He subsequently served (until 1891) as president of the Supreme Court of Justice.