Flavor Physics with light quarks and leptons

The impact of rare K decays and lepton-flavor violating processes in shedding light on physics beyond the Standard Model is reviewd. To this purpose, I first recall the formulation of the Minimal Flavor Violation hypothesis --both in the quark and in the lepton sector-- and then use it as guiding principle in comparing the new-physics sensitivity of different rare processes. On the phenomenological side, the discussion is focused mainly on the impact of K -> pi nu nu-bar, mu -> e gamma, and lepton-flavor universality tests with Kl2 and Pl2 decays.