Recueil général des lois et actes du gouvernement d'Haïti, Tome II (1809-1817)

Tome II of the Recueil général des lois et actes du gouvernement d'Haïti, the canonical compilation of Haitian legislation from the proclamation of independence onward, covering 1809-1817 in 672 pages.

The series was assembled by S. Linstant, an advocate of the imperial court at Port-au-Prince and a member of the Chamber of Representatives, who later signed himself Linstant Pradine, former chargé d'affaires of Haiti in London and Paris. From Tome III the title page adds that the texts carry historical, jurisprudential and concordance notes, That apparatus separates the compilation from a bare gazette reprint: each act is placed against the acts it amends and the decisions that construed it. The later volumes were compiled and published by decision of the Conseil des Secrétaires d'État, The state commissioned the series; it is not a private compilation. This volume was edited by S. Linstant.

It carries the division of the country and the Pétion republic: the acts of the two governments, the 1816 constitutional revision, and the early laws on land distribution, revenue and the army.

For a corpus whose earliest continuous legal holdings otherwise begin in the twentieth century, the eight volumes are the primary record of the first four decades of Haitian statute, and the only accessible source for most of the instruments that later codes and decrees cite but do not reproduce.