Bulletin des arrêts du Tribunal de cassation, 1900

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 volume carries its compiler's credentials on the title page: Senator Bourjolly, formerly government commissioner and judge both of the civil tribunal of Port-au-Prince and of the Tribunal de cassation. It was printed at the Imprimerie Aug. A. Héraux in 1906, six years after the year it reports.

A six-year lag between judgment and publication is itself a finding. Case law that reaches practitioners years late cannot guide behaviour in the interval, and the gap explains why Haitian commercial practice of the period leaned on contract drafting, with settled precedent doing little work. Prescription, the running of limitation periods, is prominent in this volume's subject profile.

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.