The priesthood metaphor works quite well as well since everything they touch ends up in a fashion that may as well have been written in Latin. And it's all wholly unnecessary since, contrary to the common perception of law operating on esoteric interpretations of a comma, lots of things in law come down to reasonable discretion. Of course exercising that reasonable discretion oneself requires first decrypting the text, which is outside the bounds of most laymen. So lawyers get paid lots of money to decipher texts that lawyers were paid lots of money to encipher using a legal system composed by politicians who were themselves, overwhelmingly, lawyers as well.

Dante's 8th Circle indeed.

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nradov an hour ago | parent [-]

The legal profession is hardly a priesthood. If you're referring to contracts, most of the language is pretty simple. You have to learn a bit of jargon but much less than in software development. I think a lot of people are just intimidated or lazy and don't even try.

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somenameforme 40 minutes ago | parent [-]

Feel free to have a go at this: https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/6028...

It's a critical law currently working its way through congress. It's not only indecipherable, but far longer than the entire original US Constitution. And that's a trend - when things were done by people and for people, they tended to be brief and clear. As lawyers got involved, everything became a convoluted indecipherable mess which may as well be written in Latin.

	▲	tzs 13 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> It's not only indecipherable, but far longer than the entire original US Constitution. I took a look at a few random sections of it and didn't see anything undecipherable, other than maybe things that lack enough context because it is written as a diff from the current law. The comparison to the length of the Constitution makes little sense to me. The Constitution establishes a framework and some power allocations. It says almost nothing about the bazillion lower level details necessary to actual have a functioning county.