The paper deals with the level of legal knowledge among the Hungarian population measured with a representative survey asking questions regarding the knowledge of certain constitutional, civil, administrative and procedural legal rules releant in everyday life. Our findings are compared to a research carried out in 1965, using the same questions. Furthermore we analysed the relationship of knowledge level as a dependent variable with (i) socio-demographic (gender, age, education, etc.), (ii) media consumption (some 30 written, electronic and internet-based items), (iii) interaction with the legal system (read a law, consulted with a lawyer, participated in a trial) and (iv) civic activity. We found that the level of education is crucial, and interaction with the legal system has some additional significant impact, too. All other independent variables seem to have less significance or no impact at all. The relative strength of explanatory variables has largely changed in the past decades and in some cases even the direction of impact altered (for example women seem to be more educated about the law nowadays, in a sharp contrast to the 1965 data.)