This article is very worth a thorough top-to-bottom read. I especially like a paragraph from farther down in the article where the author brings up an issue that often comes up here on Hacker News: "According to Pauline Kim, a professor at Washington University Law School, people tend to make inferences about the law based on what they know about more informal social norms. This frequently leads them to misunderstand their rights—and in areas like employment law, to wildly overestimate them. In 1997, Kim presented roughly 300 residents of Buffalo, New York, with a series of morally abhorrent workplace scenarios—for example, an employee is fired for reporting that a co-worker has been stealing from the company—that were nonetheless legal under the state’s 'at-will' employment regime. Eighty to 90 percent of the Buffalonians incorrectly identified each of these distasteful scenarios as illegal, revealing how little they understood about how much freedom employers actually enjoy to fire employees." I have seen this misconception here on Hacker News many times. (To be sure, here on Hacker News we have participants from many countries, not all of which have the same laws about employment, but I have seen plenty of Americans proclaim "facts" about rights of employees here in the United States that simply are not facts.) Basically, in our thoughtful discussions here, we all have to take care to check our facts. That's why I'm especially glad to upvote comments that ask earlier commenters to explain where they got their information, or to suggest further reading on a topic. I'll link a book here about employment law (mostly related to hiring procedures) as an example of the information I like to see in comments. I need to check my understanding of all issues, all the time, according to the article kindly submitted here, and I appreciate it when other HN participants help me find more information.

http://www.amazon.com/Safe-Hiring-Manual-Employment-Backgrou...