The "Four Courts" on whose "porch" Richie Goulding stands at the end of Wandering Rocks is a large neoclassical structure on the north bank of the Liffey, just west of the Richmond (now O'Donovan Rossa) Bridge which connects Winetavern Street on the river's south bank to Chancery Lane on the north. In 1904 all the superior courts in Ireland were housed in this building, whose name reflects the fact that it originally housed four such courts: Chancery, King's Bench, Exchequer, and Common Pleas. Three different sections of the tenth chapter show people bustling about at this important legal center, in a discontinuous sequence that appears to move forward in time from section to section.

The name Four Courts goes back to medieval times, when the courts were independent and competed with one another for resources and jurisdiction. For many centuries these courts were located in different places, but in 1776 work began on a grand structure to bring them together. It was designed first by Thomas Cooley and, after his death in 1784, by James Gandon, the architect who designed the Custom House. The new offices opened for business in 1796. In 1877 the Judicature Act united the four courts, making them merely divisions of a single High Court of Justice, but the name has persisted through this and subsequent organizational changes.

In an interpolated passage in section 9 of Wandering Rocks lawyers are seen moving between various offices inside the building: "Lawyers of the past, haughty, pleading, beheld pass from the consolidated taxing office to Nisi Prius court Richie Goulding carrying the costbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward and heard rustling from the admiralty division of king's bench to the court of appeal an elderly female with false teeth smiling incredulously and a black silk skirt of great amplitude."

The "Lawyers of the past" are statues of eminent lawyers and judges that used to occupy the niches on the perimeter of the Round Hall, a 64-foot-wide grand entrance underneath the building's dome where people passing to and from various offices could cross paths and converse. The building suffered massive damage at the beginning of the Civil War of 1922, and today the niches are empty. The Latin phrase "Nisi Prius" ("unless before," "if not sooner") is a term in English law that originally referred to the requirement for a sheriff to bring jurors to court by a certain day. According to the 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1911), during the 19th century it came to refer to nearly all cases tried before judges of the King's Bench court. The text identifies "the admiralty division" as one branch of that court, as was indeed the case in English law. The "court of appeal," established by law in 1875, was a high court that heard appeals from various lower courts. Richie Goulding is seen passing through the Round Hall from a taxing office to Nisi Prius court, and an unnamed woman crosses the same space going from the admiralty court to the court of appeals. 

In the next section, #10, another interpolation returns to more or less the same scene, but some small amount of time seems to have passed because the woman is now leaving the building: "An elderly female, no more young, left the building of the courts of chancery, king's bench, exchequer and common pleas, having heard in the lord chancellor's court the case in lunacy of Potterton, in the admiralty division the summons, exparte motion, of the owners of the Lady Cairns versus the owners of the barque Mona, in the court of appeal reservation of judgment in the case of Harvey versus the Ocean Accident and Guarantee Corporation." The redundant phrase "elderly female, no more young," which seems strangely maladroit for Joyce, perhaps is meant to suggest that the woman has lost her youth attending to so many legal proceedings.

In this section Joyce somewhat simplifies the bewildering variety of courts and offices encountered in the previous one by referring, with characteristic exactitude, to the four large divisions for which the building was named: "chancery, king's bench, exchequer and common pleas." The old woman, it now appears, has been attending not two but three different court cases: in addition to the hearings in the admiralty court and the appeals court, she observed one in "the lord chancellor's court." This was the court of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, the country's highest judicial officer. It appears to have been identical with the Court of Chancery, though the matter is confusing to this outsider because the Court of Chancery was technically abolished in 1877, becoming merely one division of the High Court, and the Lord Chancellor at that time was given control of the Court of Appeal. Whatever the specifics of the old woman's courtroom itinerary, she is now leaving the building, presumably through the grand central portico on King's Inns (now simply Inns) Quay.

In the final section of the chapter, #19, the viceregal cavalcade passes this spot in real (i.e., non-interpolated) time and space, but the time appears to be slightly later than in the first two passages. Richie Goulding now is standing amid the columns of the portico on the quay, where the old woman was before, while she has moved on from that location, crossing Chancery Lane to the east to visit a solicitor on Ormond Quay Upper. Both of them see the Lord Lieutenant passing by on their respective quays: "In the porch of Four Courts Richie Goulding with the costsbag of Goulding, Collis and Ward saw him with surprise. Past Richmond bridge at the doorstep of the office of Reuben J Dodd, solicitor, agent for the Patriotic Insurance Company, an elderly female about to enter changed her plan and retracing her steps by King's windows smiled credulously on the representative of His Majesty."

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John Hunt 2023