This chapter looks at the role of legal process in the works of the nineteenth century writer Sydney Owenson. It explores the fractured politics of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth in compromising Ireland’s legal system, arguing that ‘the move in Irish forensic rhetoric and imaginative writing from legal exposition to censorship […] was inevitable as a result of the gulf between abstract celebrations of common law and the reality of legislation in Ireland’. This chapter’s examination of Irish writing in the years immediately after the Act of Union suggest that this change in the legal substructure of Irish society had far-reaching consequences in fiction. As its author writes, the creation of a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland led to a ‘collapse in divisions between imaginative writing, forensic eloquence, and political disquisition’ as theoretical ideas of the justice and equity of a shared British legal identity came face to face with a repressive reality.