Does this look like your kind of question?

Can my school search my bag? What about my phone?

Almost everyone assumes the answer is a flat yes or a flat no. It is neither, and the line falls somewhere most people would not guess.

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What answering it involves. Taking something and looking inside it are two different acts. They look identical when it happens to you, and the law treats them nothing alike. Splitting one event into separate acts, each with its own rule, is most of what legal reasoning is.

Can my school punish me for something I posted from home, on a Sunday?

Schools do this routinely. Whether they can is a genuinely open question, and arguing it either way is good practice.

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What answering it involves. Where does someone's authority stop? Every power has an edge — in time, in place, in subject matter — and finding that edge is a lawyer's first move, long before asking whether the punishment was fair.

Does the Right to Education Act still apply to me at fifteen?

A lot of people assume it covers all of school. It has an age range, and there is a decent chance you have aged out of it without noticing.

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What answering it involves. Rights have edges. "Is this rule even about me?" is the question that comes before "what does this rule say", and skipping it is the commonest mistake non-lawyers make.

At what age can I open and operate my own bank account?

Younger than nearly everyone guesses. Bank marketing pages are unhelpfully vague about it.

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What answering it involves. The law does not flip one switch at eighteen. It sorts people into a surprising number of categories and hands each a different set of powers. Once you see that, "minor" stops being one thing.

Can I sign a contract at fifteen?

A boy borrowed money against his own property, lied about his age to do it, and when the lender sued, the boy won. In 1903. It is still the law.

The answer. No — and unusually completely. A minor's contract is not merely breakable, it is void from the beginning, as though it never existed. In Mohori Bibee v. Dharmodas Ghose, the Privy Council held that a minor who had mortgaged his property could keep the property, and the lender could not recover the money, even though the minor had misrepresented his age. The protection is not forfeited by the minor behaving badly.

Mohori Bibee v. Dharmodas Ghose (1903) 30 IA 114 (Privy Council) — Case law, not statute, so the 2024 BNS/BNSS renumbering does not touch it.

What answering it involves. A rule built to protect you can also take something away from you, and the law knew that when it chose. Here it decided a minor's promise is worth nothing at all — which protects children, and makes it harder for a sixteen-year-old to be taken seriously. Both are true. Working out which trade a rule is making is the whole skill.

Can I work part-time at sixteen? Where is the line against child labour?

There is a line, and it is not where "old enough to have a job" would put it. What the work is matters more than how old you are.

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What answering it involves. Two rules pointing in different directions — one protecting children from work, one permitting young people to do some of it. Reconciling rules that appear to contradict each other is not an edge case in law. It is Tuesday.

Can a shop refuse to give me a bill?

Try asking. The reaction is often more interesting than the rule.

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What answering it involves. Some rights only exist if you invoke them. Nobody arrives to enforce this one on your behalf, which raises the uncomfortable question of how many rights you have that you have never used.

I can get a learner's licence at sixteen. What can I actually ride?

Most of the internet answers this with a number that is either out of date or simply wrong. Being right about it is genuinely useful to your friends.

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What answering it involves. Precision. "A scooter" is not a legal category — engine capacity and whether it has gears are. Reading exactly what a rule says instead of what everyone assumes it says is unglamorous and it is the entire job.

Someone posted a photo of me without asking. Who owns that photo?

The answer irritates almost everybody, which is a good sign it is worth understanding.

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What answering it involves. Two things can be true at once. One person can own the photograph while you still hold rights over your own image, and those rights are not the same right. Holding two competing claims in your head without collapsing them into one is a specific skill.

Can my parents read my WhatsApp?

There is a constitutional right to privacy in India. It helps you here far less than you would expect.

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What answering it involves. Who is a right *against*? Some rights work against the State and not against your family. Asking "against whom" before "what does it protect" reorganises how the whole system looks.

What is an FIR, and can someone under eighteen get one registered?

There is also a version you can file at any station rather than the right one, which is the sort of thing worth knowing before you need it.

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What answering it involves. Procedure is power. Knowing which mechanism exists and how it is started is very often the entire difference between a wrong that gets addressed and one that does not.

What happens legally if someone under eighteen commits an offence?

Not a smaller version of the adult process. A different process, with different people and a different purpose.

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What answering it involves. The same act can be a different legal thing depending on who did it. That offends a lot of people's sense of fairness at first, and the argument for why it is right is one worth being able to make.

Can I get a passport without both parents signing?

Yes, and the answer is a specific named form. Finding out which one is harder than it should be.

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What answering it involves. The gap between the rule and the paperwork. A right you cannot complete the form for is not much of a right, and a great deal of real legal work is administrative rather than dramatic.