Know your local laws.

or

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.

What this is

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, compiled and released in June 2026 by 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 their work made browsable — the credit for the data is theirs.

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.

The dataset, in numbers

2,211,516

Ordinances

50

States

1,911

Cities

376

Counties

This is not legal advice. The text is scanned (OCR) from source documents, the topic labels and scores are machine-generated estimates, and plain-language versions are AI paraphrases, not the law itself. There are no effective dates and coverage is partial. Always confirm against your jurisdiction’s official code before relying on anything here.