The author Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) was trained as a lawyer, and his experience in the law finds its way into his novels. Just as he was ahead of his time in his art, so too was he ahead of his time in his observations about the law. In this article, we will examine how his observations are a forerunner to modern critical perspectives on the law. We focus on three aspects of this critique: his adoption of legal realism (which also entailed legal scepticism), his sociological analysis of the law, and his deconstructionist critique of it. We will also identify homologies between his perspective and that of American legal realists such as Oliver Wendell Holmes; sociologists Pierre Bourdieu, Patricia Ewick and Susan S Silbey; and deconstructionist Jacques Derrida.