Illiteracy and Contract

What puzzles me a little bit is the idea that illiteracy is a new problem for which the law needs to make provision by analogy. Surely it occurs to you that the law we use is law fashioned in an almost entirely illiterate culture, and that the law of contract over the last thousand years has assumed both that most contractors can't read or write and that oral contracts are as valid as written ones? The idea that illiterate people are children, unworthy of serious business, would not have appealed to the aristocrats of medieval Europe, nor to most of the merchants of a medieval city. Early modern literacy in England measured by the sort of scale you use here would have resulted in numbers rather poorer than the bulk of India today. (And one should always remember Kerala, where after two generations of elected Communist government, literacy in the second-poorest state in India is roughly at the level of the United States.)

So the rules for the binding nature of contracts a party couldn't read are hardly recent inventions to deal with a pocket problem. They are the basic principles made of a combination of English local justice extending back long before the Norman Conquest, and the particular and complex history of English royal justice's long association with the written document under seal. To treat the illiterate as incompetent, moreover, would hurt not the banks, but illiterate persons themselves, who have every reason to prefer a dangerous autonomy to an undignified incapacity that would deprive them of their livelihoods and independence.