Abstract: The subject of this research is the normative judicial system of the Russian Empire concerning the termination of employment contracts for agricultural works. The author studies the grounds for dismissal prescribed in the “Regulations concerning employment for agricultural works” of the 12th of June 1886 and the practice of their actual implementation. The article presents a comparative analysis with legislative norms regarding contract termination for factory employment as the main branch of the hired labour market in the 1880–1910s. The author describes the technical and judicial shortcomings of the studied regulations and analyses the social and economic context of adopting the “Regulations concerning employment for agricultural works”. The research’s methodology is the following: historical-judicial, legalistic, historical, comparative, analysis, deduction, induction, dialectical. On the basis of the research results the author comes to the principal conclusion according to which the legislative regulation of contract termination for agricultural works corresponded to the world’s and Russia’s levels of legislation of the time. The general direction of the studied norms was of a conservative-protective nature and corresponded to the direction of the internal politics of the 1880–1890s. At the same time certain prescriptions and approaches were caused by both the objective needs of households and the particularities of working in the agricultural sphere. Moreover, some of the established laws differed into the direction of softening the workers’ position in comparison to the norms of factory-plant legislation. The existing technical judicial shortcomings regarding the practice of dismissal concerned equally the level of judicial technique of the end of the 19th century and the law-makers’ subjective aims of preserving the employers’ wide ranging powers.