There is evidence to suggest that labelled delinquents are disadvantaged because they lack social survival skills. The present study examines the proposition that labelled delinquents are disadvantaged because they have a poorer knowledge of the law. A 33-item multiple-choice questionnaire covering a wide range of offence and police encounter situations was administered to 221 institutional adolescents (labelled group) while 205 school students provided the comparison non-institutional group (non-labelled). There were two general findings. First, the non-institutional group was significantly better than the institutional group, but all the adolescents showed a disturbingly limited knowledge of many laws. Second the superior performance of the non-institutional group was not "ali-or-none": on some items the institutional group were superior. The findings were discussed in terms of differing experiential background and the social disadvantage of the institutional adolescents.