Legal culture is the individual's total body of knowledge, values, and attitudes in regard to his rights and opportunities to exercise them in practice. The foundations of legal culture are laid down in adolescence. Young people very often encounter a great many obstacles that limit their rights, opportunities, and equality, such as flaws in the legal system, age discrimination, the low level of legal education, and inadequate legal protection. For this reason, to have an understanding of the social nature of the contradictions that arise in the formation of legal culture it is essential to view them from the standpoint of the particular stage of societal development. It is of interest to look at a comparative study of the shaping of the legal culture of adolescents in Russia and in the Republic of Belarus. The current period in Russia and Belarus is characterized by shared processes due to the same social and economic conditions of their lengthy development together, and by specific processes that stem from their national characteristics and the particular nature of the strategies of transformation that they have chosen. Both shared and individual tendencies have been manifested in the reforms of their legal systems, which have been implemented in different ways in legal relations and are reflected in different ways in the consciousness of people, in particular young people. The influence of social and political transformations on legal relations and the state of the legal culture of young people can be discerned in both countries. The purpose of the present article is to determine the degree of this influence, the current state and basic tendencies of the development of the legal culture of Russian and Belarusian adolescents.(Contains 7 tables and 1 note.)