Legal traditions shape citizens’ relationships with their courts. Building upon scholarship examining how common law and civil law systems affect a variety of economic and political outcomes, we ask whether legal traditions affect citizens’ support for judicial power. Relative to common law, we argue that civil law judiciaries may appear to citizens as unfairly favoring the state, ignoring the context of their specific cases, and
inefficient, thus dampening their willingness to obey court decisions. To test our theory, we leverage variation in legal tradition across 33 African states and Afrobarometer survey data across six survey rounds with over 200,000 respondents. We find in civil law countries that citizens’ perceptions that the law treats people unequally mediates their lower support for vertical judicial power relative to common law countries.