Joseph Louis Elzéar Ortolan

Joseph Louis Elzéar Ortolan (1802 to 1873) was a French jurist, born at Toulon, who studied law at Aix-en-Provence and Paris. He made his name early with the Explication historique des institutes de Justinien (1827) and the Histoire de la législation romaine (1828). He became assistant librarian and, after the Revolution of 1830, secretary-general of the Court of Cassation, lectured on constitutional law at the Sorbonne, and in 1836 took the chair of comparative criminal law at the Paris Faculty of Law. He published many works on constitutional and comparative law, among them a history of constitutional law in Europe in the Middle Ages (1831) and an introduction to the study of comparative penal legislation (1841), and he also wrote a volume of poetry, Les enfantines (1845).