L Local Law Lookup

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.

Opacity spectrummachine estimate

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.

Plain EnglishDense legalese

Denser than 41% of U.S. provisions (z = -0.24, estimate)

BuildingsAtlanta, GA · 104.2

Plumbing Permits NOT Required Under This Code

No plain-language version yet — see the original text.

Avg sentence 35 wordsLongest 46 wordsReads at a graduate level
Paternalism spectrummachine estimate

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.

Leaves you aloneRegulates conduct

More restrictive than 46% of U.S. provisions (z = -0.09, estimate)

BusinessHonolulu, HI

§ 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.

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.

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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.

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.