The local laws where you live, in plain sight.
City and county ordinances govern noise, pets, fences, permits, and starting a business. They are public, but among the most fragmented law in the United States: there is no central index, and every town’s code lives on a different site or in a PDF, in its own format.
LOCUS is an open dataset, released in June 2026 by researchers Denis Peskoff, Joe Barrow, Christopher Vu, and Diag Davenport. They gathered those codes, read them with OCR, and labeled every provision into one uniform table.
This site is a view on top of that dataset. It does not compile the data or write the law; it renders a readable page for every one of the 2,287 cities and counties LOCUS covers.
Source: LOCUS-v1 on Hugging Face · the paper · how this site is built.
Start here
Find your town.
Start with the place you live and read its real ordinances — the noise rules, the permit lists, the fence heights.
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 explore
Explore cities →
Every covered place on a map, plus the largest cities and counties to browse.
How laws differ →
Two laws can say the same thing in very different ways. Slide across a scale and read real examples.
Rankings →
Where each place sits on the national scale, by how its laws are written and what they regulate.