L Local Law Lookup

About the data

Local Law Lookup is a free, non-commercial tool for reading the city and county ordinances that shape everyday life. It is built on LOCUS-v1, an open corpus of U.S. local law released by researchers at UC Berkeley.

Where the text comes from

The LOCUS project gathered municipal and county codes published across many vendor platforms, ran optical character recognition (OCR) to turn scanned and exported documents into text, then split each code into individual provisions. Machine-learning classifiers labeled every provision by topic and whether it states a substantive rule. We keep only the substantive provisions and present them grouped by topic.

What the labels mean

Topics (Zoning, Nuisance, Buildings, Business, Other) are model predictions, not official categories. The three lenses on each jurisdiction page (everyday rules, starting a business, renting and property) are our own keyword groupings layered on top of those topics to make the text easier to navigate. The “densely worded” flag reflects an opacity score from the LOCUS models. Treat all of these as helpful signposts, not authoritative classifications.

Important limitations

  • This is not legal advice and is not a substitute for a lawyer.
  • Text is OCR'd and may contain scanning errors; labels are automated and unaudited.
  • There are no effective dates or amendment history. A provision shown here may be outdated, amended, or repealed.
  • Coverage is partial. For each county the corpus keeps one representative code, so your specific town may not appear.
  • It does not resolve which level of government (state, county, or city) controls a given question.
  • Always verify against the official municipal code.

Attribution & license

The underlying data is the LOCUS-v1 corpus by Denis Peskoff, Joe Barrow, Christopher Vu, and Diag Davenport (2026), used under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 license. This tool is non-commercial in keeping with that license. 

@article{peskoff2026freeing,
  title   = {Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States},
  author  = {Peskoff, Denis and Barrow, Joe and Vu, Christopher and Davenport, Diag},
  journal = {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.19334},
  year    = {2026}
}

Dataset: huggingface.co/datasets/LocalLaws/LOCUS-v1 · Paper: arXiv:2606.19334