Just a few musings here after reading some posts dealing with legal issues...

Seems to me there's an appalling lack of education among younger (and, to be sure, some older) folks about the basic mechanics of how our legal system works. I'm thinking primarily in terms of day-to-day business operations, contract law, warranties, things of that nature. Almost everything that gets passed around anecdotally about things like "cooling off periods" or "lemon laws" is wrong, and people don't seem to grasp things like "as-is" really meaning "as-is."

It surely seems to me that part of a high school education across the country should be a mandatory if basic understanding of what constitutes a contract, the difference(s) between implied and express warranties, what it means to be obligated by a contract, or to breach a contract, rights and responsibilities under things like rental agreements, things of that nature. Things that involve fairly common elements of day-to-day life.

Now, mind you, I'm not suggesting we churn out a generation of lawyers, or try to bury them in legal minutiae or making them memorize the Uniform Commercial Code or anything that draconian. I think a great many people truly don't understand that, for example, signing a contract is legally binding them to certain terms; that a car sold "as-is" has zero warranty from the seller. In a nutshell, I'm suggesting that we are failing to provide our kids with even a minimum level of competency in the basic mechanics of our legal system, which should be fundamental for any young adult participating in society. That failure creates a whole additional layer of inefficiency in our economic society we've never even begun to measure.

I know, we're struggling to get kids literate, education is struggling, surely understand all of that. I'm just wondering how something that, to me, seems pretty basic has gone largely unnoticed over the years.

Any thoughts?