There's a huge gray area between "not understanding the law" and "being competent to litigate a case in court." It is entirely possible for non-lawyers to understand the gist of the law at a high level. And thus it's not acceptable to tolerate misleading headlines about legal decisions any more than it is to tolerate misleading headlines about any other decision. And God knows I've seen enough of them about other issues that are within my realm of professional expertise.

The problem is that our system as currently set up does not incentivize reporters working a "beat" for years where they develop enough domain expertise on a field to report on it competently. If we had actual senior legal reporters, senior national security reporters, senior tech reporters, and so on, they would have enough knowledge of those fields to effectively write for laypeople.