Otto Lenel (13 December 1849 – 7 February 1935) was a German Jewish jurist and legal historian.

In 1882, Lenel became famous, when he won a prize which had been offered by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences with his reconstruction of the edict of the praetors (see below).

In 1885 he became a professor taught at the University of Strassburg, which had become a German institution after the war of 1870/71 in which Lenel himself had fought.

[2] On his 80th birthday, Lenel received a gratulatory letter, which was signed by academics representing 20 countries of various continents and 100 universities.

After Lenel's death, the members of his family met a cruel fate in Nazi Germany: His widow of more than 80 years of age, Luise, née Eberstadt (born 25 February 1857 in Frankfurt) and his daughter Bertha Lenel (born 7 March 1882 in Freiburg) were sent on 22 October 1940 to an internment camp in Gurs, France.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Otto Lenel's death, a sign was affixed to his last residence at Holbeinstrasse 5 in Freiburg, Germany.

Lenel reconstructed both the text of the edict and tried to establish the order in which the surviving fragments of legal writings had originally been presented before they were cut out and rearranged in the digest.

The results of his research on the writings of the Roman jurists are contained in the two volumes entitled Palingenesia juris civilis.

It enables modern scholars to consider the original context of the source texts and it helps us understand the technicalities of Rome's legal system.