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)
Plumbing Permits NOT Required Under This Code
No plain-language version yet — see the original text.
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
No plain-language version yet — see the original text.
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.
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.
Loading jurisdictions…
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. The open LOCUS corpus gathered these codes, read them with OCR, and labeled every provision into one uniform table. This site renders a detailed page for every one of the 2,287 cities and counties in it.