As a lawyer, I disagree. The judicial system depends on the faith of ordinary individuals in it. That means opinions must be written for the public to read, not only other lawyers.
My view is that nothing is so complicated that you can’t explain the gist of it to my mother in law (an intellectually curious woman who nonetheless never finished her college degree). In fact if you’re in front of a jury, that’s exactly what you might have to do.
You explaining the gist of a law and a Hacker News reading the law directly have two very different probabilities of returning a "cockamamie interpretation."
Circuit court and (especially) supreme court decisions are meant to be read. They're fairly accessible.
Even an entirely lay reader will often be much better informed by simply reading the decision than reading some media description of it. The 'spin' of the decision at least has the force of law, while the spin of the media is just clickbait to generate more traffic.
It’s more like arguing you shouldn’t self diagnose your symptoms because you’re not a doctor.
And also, someone who doesn’t know how to code isn’t going to be able to make sense of the source so that particular type of Dunning-Kruger problem is self correcting with programming in a way it’s not with law (or medicine).
You'll learn a lot by reading and it's probably easier to understand than you might think. If you don't do this other people take advantage of you. They do it a lot more than you would think.
