Its pretty mindless, even the "reading" and "researching" is extremely dull. The level of logical complexity isn't that great and its a lot of overworded nonsense.
The body of knowledge in law is vast and some areas can be intellectually stimulating as well (depending on one's interests). "Overworded nonsense" that you usually see (in contracts or legislation, I suppose) happens when less than stellar lawyers are made to write stuff upon a deadline, and is the equivalent of "spaghetti code". Usually, it's fine since nobody (I think) gives you a bonus for succinct writing when drafting a contract. But you might get in trouble for missing some "edge cases". There's also a lot of cargo culting (magic Latin incantations) and building on questionable templates (technical debt). Sometimes people intentionally write in weird illegible ways to impress people (think Perl one liners).
Anyway, when most programmers see an unfamiliar codebase for the first time, they'd probably think most of the code are "overworded nonsense" until they fully understand the "business requirements" and the special cases implemented. (This is where the adage against complete rewrites comes from.) Unless you're really an expert in the area of law, you're probably not qualified to say that some legal texts are overworded nonsense.
But yeah, there's more parallels in law and software engineering than one might think. I'm a software engineer by trade, not a lawyer, but I do have a degree in law, and I often read up on cases or occasionally do my own legal research mostly for fun and personal interest. I would contend your "extremely dull" claim. TBH I might read more legal texts than Other People's Code, the latter which I generally hate doing, and is usually more boring for me (and occasionally infuriating when I know the coders spewing writing crap instead of putting effort in making the stuff succinct and clean).
My friend group is about 60% lawyers, so I have a reasonable sense of what I'm talking about. I think a lot of software is also over-worded nonsense, and I try very hard to make sure I don't work in a place where that's encouraged. But the issue is that the law is the law and the over-worded nonsense is inescapable and very much encouraged. Now you can say only lawyers are allowed to say that, but a lot of lawyers will say that (in private anyway, not if you're paying them). A lot of the complexity comes down to the fact that its very hard to change the law. I understand your parallels with a piece of software, now imagine a piece of software built slowly over 100s of years by programmers with very divergent motivations, and which required massive amounts of consensus to make changes to. Oh and no automated testing or types or any mathematical correctness built in anywhere, which is actually the stuff that makes software elegant and powerful. That would be one truly horrific piece of software, and imo thats what legal code is.
It depends on what you are doing. Legal research and writing can be anywhere from kind of dull to fascinating. That's also true for pretty much any job, so I'm not sure what your point is.
The body of knowledge in law is vast and some areas can be intellectually stimulating as well (depending on one's interests). "Overworded nonsense" that you usually see (in contracts or legislation, I suppose) happens when less than stellar lawyers are made to write stuff upon a deadline, and is the equivalent of "spaghetti code". Usually, it's fine since nobody (I think) gives you a bonus for succinct writing when drafting a contract. But you might get in trouble for missing some "edge cases". There's also a lot of cargo culting (magic Latin incantations) and building on questionable templates (technical debt). Sometimes people intentionally write in weird illegible ways to impress people (think Perl one liners).
Anyway, when most programmers see an unfamiliar codebase for the first time, they'd probably think most of the code are "overworded nonsense" until they fully understand the "business requirements" and the special cases implemented. (This is where the adage against complete rewrites comes from.) Unless you're really an expert in the area of law, you're probably not qualified to say that some legal texts are overworded nonsense.
But yeah, there's more parallels in law and software engineering than one might think. I'm a software engineer by trade, not a lawyer, but I do have a degree in law, and I often read up on cases or occasionally do my own legal research mostly for fun and personal interest. I would contend your "extremely dull" claim. TBH I might read more legal texts than Other People's Code, the latter which I generally hate doing, and is usually more boring for me (and occasionally infuriating when I know the coders spewing writing crap instead of putting effort in making the stuff succinct and clean).
That said, believe whatever you want.