The local rules where you live, in plain sight.
City and county ordinances govern noise, pets, fences, permits, and starting a business. They are public, but scattered and hard to read. This site is a viewer for LOCUS, an open dataset of U.S. local law released in June 2026 that gathered millions of these ordinances into one place. We don’t write or change the law. We just make the data easy to explore.
Source: LOCUS-v1 on Hugging Face · the paper · how this site is built.
Explore
The law isn’t one thing. Slide across it.
Every ordinance in the corpus is scored on a few dimensions. Drag the handle to travel from one extreme to the other and read a real law at each stop, with a plain-language version alongside the original.
From plain English to dense legalese
LOCUS scores every U.S. ordinance for how densely it’s written. Drag along the scale to read real laws at each level — the original text, and a plain-language version.
Denser than 41% of U.S. provisions (z = -0.24, estimate)
§ 217-28. Declaration of emergency
The Mayor can declare an emergency during a flood, serious fire, or similar crisis, and the police chief can declare a snow emergency. While one is in effect, you can't park or leave a vehicle on the affected streets.
Plain-language version, written by AI from the original below. A paraphrase, not the law. Read the original and verify before relying on it.
From leaving you alone to telling you what you can do
How much a law steps in to regulate personal conduct, scored by the LOCUS models. Drag to compare the hands-off end with the rules that govern behavior.
More restrictive than 46% of U.S. provisions (z = -0.09, estimate)
Notice of removal
When an officer tows a vehicle and can find the owner, they must promptly notify the owner in writing of the tow, the reason, and where it's stored. If the owner can't be found and the vehicle isn't returned within three days, the officer must report it to the state and notify the storage garage.
Plain-language version, written by AI from the original below. A paraphrase, not the law. Read the original and verify before relying on it.
Go local
Find your town.
Each place opens with a portrait of how it governs compared with the rest of the country, then everyday questions, notable rules, and the full code to browse.
Your precise location never leaves your browser — we only compare it against the 19 pilot cities to find the closest one.
Large cities
Chicago
ILDetroit
MIBaltimore
MDSan Diego
CAPortland
ORSeattle
WAAtlanta
GANew Orleans
LAHouston
TXHonolulu
HISmall towns
San Francisco
CAUtqiagvik
AKCloudcroft
NMMarshfield
WISteamboatrock
IALake Placid Village
NYState College Borough
PATerry
MTGrangeville
IDThe dataset
The most scattered law in America, gathered in one place.
Local ordinances are the most fragmented body of law in the United States. There is no central index. Every town’s code lives on a different site or in a PDF, in its own format. The open LOCUS corpus gathered these codes, read them with OCR, and labeled every provision into one uniform table. This pilot renders detailed pages for 19 of them.