Bulletin des arrêts du Tribunal de cassation, 1891-1893

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.

The first ruling holds that the requirement of article 148 of the code of civil procedure is satisfied whenever the statements of the submissions, the reasons and the operative part emerge clearly and without effort from the judgment. It is a standard of adequacy for written reasons, and a lenient one.

How strictly a supreme court polices the reasoning of lower judgments determines how predictable litigation is, and a permissive standard lowers the cost of getting a judgment while raising the cost of relying on one. Succession and property matters are unusually prominent in this volume's subject profile, which is the litigation pattern of an economy where land title is the principal asset.

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.