Ludwig Josef Gerstner

Joseph Gerstner (10 October 1830 - 20 March 1883) was an economics professor and a scholar of constitutional law who became a politician (DFP).

Life Ludwig Joseph Gerstner was born into a Catholic family in Burg Abenberg, a small town in the hilly countryside south of Nuremberg. A year later he received his habilitation (higher degree) back at Erlangen.

In 1862, Gerstner was appointed a Professor of National Economics ("Staatswirtschaft") at the University of Würzburg. In his "Basic primer on National Administration" ("Grundlehren der Staatsverwaltung"), a work triggered by the reconfiguration of the Bavarian civil service,

Despite the similarity of such aspirations to the natural law doctrines popular during the eighteenth century, they found real resonance in Gerstner's own time, when predicated on the separation between society and the state propounded by Robert von Mohl, and based on a constructive interaction between constitution and administration. Gerstner's attempt to develop a curriculum covering public administration embracing "Doctrine of Administration in all material aspects" in turn drew influence from Lorenz von Stein's book, "Administration Primer" ("Verwaltungslehre").

Joseph Gerstner was able to combine his membership of the German national assembly (Reichstag) with membership of the Bavarian Landtag, the lower house of Bavaria's ("regional") parliament. He is listed as a member of the Bavarian Landtag between 1869 and 1875. In the Bavarian legislature (where, naturally, he is also listed as a member of the DFP) he was a member of no fewer than six apparently important parliamentary committees, suggesting that in reality he probably devoted more time to his parliamentary responsibilities in the Munich assembly than those in the national parliament in Berlin.