This study reads five contemporary novels by Irish writers to examine the reciprocal influences of law and Irish fiction in their work. The selected workds by Colm T ib n, Edna O’Brien, John Banville, Kevin Barry and Mike McCormack span a relatively short period of time (1989 to 2013) but take a long view of the fraught relationship between the Irish people and institutions of legal, political and social power, from the enactment of the 1937 Constitution, Bunreacht na h ireann to the apparent breakdown in the legitimacy of the state following the Celtic Tiger crash of 2008. Each chapter is devoted to a particular novel, tracing different thematic and formal appropriations of law or law-like systems across a broad developmental arc, from the critical realism of Colm T ib n through to the historiographic metafiction of Kevin Barry and the domestic science fiction of Mike McCormack.