When he drafted his irreverent broadside “Gas from a Burner” (1912) on the back of a publisher’s proposed contract, Joyce created an emblem of law’s relationship to literature: two disciplines inscribed on top of each other, each legible within the other’s conditioning text and context. This essay approaches the stories of Dubliners as if they were written on the back of the law, as if they endorsed the language and methodology of law within their scrupulous mimesis. The essay focuses on three stories in particular—“Eveline, ” “Counterparts,” and “A Mother” —to show how the legal concepts of promises, contracts, rights, and duties inform and structure Joyce’s early fictions. Eveline Hill is torn between promises made to her dead mother and her living fiancé, unable to decide between numbing domestic duty and a dimly perceived right to happiness. Farrington’s escalating violence in the workplace, the pub, and the home is highlighted by the technical device known as a counterparts clause, a formality of modern contracting and leasing. “A Mother” draws on the substance of contract law to show that Kathleen Kearney’s legal rights are vulnerable to informal professional norms, on the one hand, and her mother’s deferred romantic needs and drive for status, on the other. Law operates powerfully and poignantly in these stories, a shaping force that allows us to study more closely the individual conduct of Joyce’s Dubliners and to assess the justice of their interactions.