alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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.