Does the legacy left by colonial institutions have an effect on the post-independence judicial system? At first glance, the legal system of the colonizing country seems to have little consequence after independence. Although the Sykes-Picot Agreement gave France and England equal spheres of influence in the Middle East, not one state in the contemporary Middle East has a common law legal system, which one would expect to find in former British colonies. There is more variation, however, when it comes to the place of religious group law in the state judicial system. In some places, like Lebanon, religious groups exercise complete autonomy in the domain of personal status law, such that each group is permitted to use its own legal rules in separate, group-run courts. In others, such as Egypt, minority religious groups have considerably less autonomy. In this paper, I argue that colonial-era reforms are causally linked to variations in the devolution of judicial power to religious minority groups. In most European colonies or protectorates, colonial officials attempted to centralize the court system and unify the country’s laws. Although they initially left personal status law under the control of religious groups, in most places by the 1920s they began to centralize this domain as well. The capacity of groups to resist this change, and to fend off post-independence efforts at centralization, can be explained by the extent to which group legal systems remained strongly institutionalized throughout the colonial period. In Lebanon, Ottoman and French rule served to strengthen religious group cohesion, whereas in Egypt, Ottoman and British rule weakened the unity of Egypt’s strongest minority religion, the Coptic Orthodox church. The ability of minority group courts and legal institutions to survive the disruption of the colonial period intact affects the outcome of strategic negotiations between these groups and the post-independence regime concerning the role of group law in the state legal system.