The local laws where you live, in plain sight.
City and county ordinances govern noise, pets, fences, permits, and starting a business — public, but scattered and hard to read. Start with your own town.
Both your city and your county make local law, so we show the nearest of each. Your precise location never leaves your browser — we only compare it against the jurisdictions we cover.
Or pick a place
Already know the town?
Search any of the 2,287 covered cities and counties. Each 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.
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See it in plain language
The law isn’t one thing. Slide across it.
Every ordinance 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 hand-written 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)
Plumbing Permits NOT Required Under This Code
Some minor plumbing work needs no permit, as long as it follows the manufacturer's instructions and state and federal law: repairing the working parts of a faucet or valve, clearing clogs, fixing leaks that need five feet of pipe or less replaced, swapping broken faucets or valves, and repairing already-permitted appliances without changing the existing pipes.
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)
§ 13-11.9 Installation, maintenance, and repair of publication dispensing enclosures, spaces, and inserts
The city installs, maintains, and repairs the newspaper-rack enclosures at its own cost. The permit holder must maintain its own rack space and keep its rack insert in good working order. Failing to do so can get the permit suspended or revoked.
Plain-language version, written by AI from the original below. A paraphrase, not the law. Read the original and verify before relying on it.
The 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. This site is a viewer for LOCUS, an open dataset released in June 2026 that gathered these codes, read them with OCR, and labeled every provision into one uniform table. We don’t write or change the law — we render a detailed page for every one of the 2,287 cities and counties in it.
Source: LOCUS-v1 on Hugging Face · the paper · how this site is built.