The body of law promulgated for Henry Christophe's kingdom in northern Haiti, presented to the king by his Privy Council with a dedicatory address that is itself part of the argument.

That address casts codification as an act of civilizational self-assertion. The council claims that no page of history offers a precedent for what has been done for the Haitian people, and that drafting these laws meant erasing the last vestiges of a system the nation has repudiated for good. Existing law is described as a patchwork of old edicts and ordinances, obscure enough to leave magistrates without authority and citizens without recourse.

What follows is a civil code together with laws of commerce, of prizes taken at sea, of civil and criminal procedure, of correctional and criminal police, of cultivation and of the military. The agricultural laws carry particular weight: the council presents the rural cultivator as the largest part of the population and farming as the state's foundation.