I guess, if you live in an oppressive regime and have to use whatever means are available, you get a good training. Alternatively, if the society is comparably more free and you don't use your rights, you tend to forget about them - why, most of the time it works by default. But when suddenly something doesn't work - you don't know what to do.

Compare to approaches Russian opposition is taking. They have to know law, often know (much) better than judges which don't follow the law anyway - but at least the opposition reasoning and their logical constructions could be heard. I guess, not anymore - state-controlled media isn't going to provide objective coverage of "criminals" in courts.