Bulletin des arrêts du Tribunal de cassation, 1859-1862

The Bulletin des arrêts is the published record of the Tribunal de cassation, Haiti's court of final appeal. Each volume prints the rulings in full, each headed by the point of law decided, which makes the series usable: a reader can see how the court read a code article before reading the reasoning.

This volume is an extract from the Moniteur haïtien, printed at the Imprimerie Nationale in July 1859. Its opening passage cites article 66 of the law on judicial organisation, which had long provided that all rulings of the Tribunal be published, and the volume is the act of finally doing so.

It is the earliest judicial record in this corpus, and the largest of the nineteenth-century volumes: about 1.6 million characters of rulings whose dated audiences run from 1858 to 1862, concentrated on 1859 to 1861. The subject profile is dominated by commercial matters and by seizure and execution. That is the docket of a period in which the state's debts and the coffee trade generated most of the litigation reaching the top of the system.

Contract enforcement, the execution of judgments and the settlement of property claims are the constraints every business-climate diagnostic of Haiti names, and this series is the primary record of how the highest court actually decided them.