Going Back to Law School: Why a PhD in Computing Needs Planning Law

“So what are you doing now?”

“I’m going back to college.”

“Oh, a postdoc?”

“No, law school.”

The silence that follows this exchange is, I’ve discovered, a very specific kind of silence. It’s the silence of someone trying to figure out whether you’ve had a breakdown or a breakthrough, and being too polite to ask which.

I enrolled in the Advanced Diploma in Environmental and Planning Law at the Honourable Society of King’s Inns in Dublin. King’s Inns is Ireland’s oldest legal institution, founded in 1541. The building looks exactly like you’d imagine a place founded in 1541 to look. The course costs about €3,200, which is either very expensive or very cheap depending on whether you compare it to an Irish PhD (free, with stipend) or an American JD (roughly the cost of a small house).

Why Planning Law

Here’s the thing about planning: it’s a system. A complicated, rule-governed, occasionally maddening system. If you want to build something in Ireland, say a house or a wind farm or a shopping centre, you need to apply for planning permission. Your application is assessed against a development plan, national planning guidelines, environmental regulations, and about forty years of case law. The decision can be appealed to An Bord Pleanala (the planning appeals board). The whole process can take months or years.

I was starting to think seriously about building AI tools for this system. What would eventually become AutoPlan was already forming in my head. But here’s what I realised sitting in a co-working space in Dublin, trying to understand why planning applications fail: you can’t build good software for a domain you don’t understand. You especially can’t build AI for a domain you don’t understand, because the AI will learn your misunderstandings and scale them.

So I went to learn the domain properly.

What Planning Law Actually Involves

The diploma covered environmental law (EU directives, environmental impact assessment, habitats regulations), planning law proper (the Planning and Development Acts, development plans, zoning, building regulations), and administrative law (judicial review, procedural fairness, the rules of natural justice). There was a lot of reading. Like, a PhD-competitive amount of reading, except instead of academic papers it was statutory instruments and High Court judgments.

Here’s a tangent: legal writing and academic writing are both terrible, but they’re terrible in completely different ways. Academic writing is terrible because it uses jargon to sound precise. Legal writing is terrible because it uses precision to avoid ambiguity, which means sentences that run to 200 words with nested subordinate clauses and cross-references to sections of Acts that themselves cross-reference other Acts. Reading a planning judgment after four years of reading IEEE papers felt like switching from one dialect of Difficult to another.

The content, though, was fascinating. Planning law is where abstract policy meets physical reality. Every decision about what can be built where, and how tall, and what colour, and how close to a river, represents a balancing act between individual property rights, community interests, environmental protection, and economic development. It’s systems thinking wearing a wig.

The Looks on People’s Faces

I was the only person in the class with a PhD in computing. Most of my classmates were practicing solicitors, barristers, or local authority planners. They were uniformly lovely and uniformly baffled by my presence.

“But why do you need this?” one of the barristers asked me during a break, genuine curiosity on her face.

I explained the AI angle. She thought about it for a moment and said, “That’s either very clever or very strange.” I told her I was hoping for both.

The lecturers were practising lawyers and planning professionals. They brought real cases, real frustrations, real stories about developments that went wrong and the legal consequences. One lecturer spent 20 minutes on a single case about a farmer who built a shed 2 metres too close to a county road and the resulting five-year legal battle. The shed cost €8,000 to build. The legal costs exceeded €45,000. Planning law in miniature.

Why Engineers Should Study Law

I’m increasingly convinced that more technical people should study law, or at least study a regulated domain in depth. Not to become lawyers, but because it teaches you things that engineering education doesn’t.

It teaches you that systems built by humans for humans are messy, contradictory, and full of edge cases that exist because of specific historical events. It teaches you that “correct” and “legal” and “fair” are three different things. It teaches you that the person using your software operates inside constraints you can’t see from your IDE.

Most importantly, it gave me the vocabulary to talk to planning professionals without sounding like a tech person who’d read one blog post about planning reform. That vocabulary turned out to be worth considerably more than €3,200.

I finished the diploma. I didn’t become a lawyer. But I started AutoPlan knowing what a material contravention was, and that turned out to matter quite a lot.