Local ordinances—which regulate zoning, housing, and public health—are now accessible as structured data for AI research, opening new possibilities for studying how everyday regulations are written and enforced across America.
LOCUS is a machine-readable corpus of nearly all U.S. local ordinances (codes from 9,239 cities and counties) that were previously locked in vendor platforms. The researchers used OCR to extract these fragmented documents and built an access layer covering 2,309 counties, enabling large-scale AI research on local law for the first time.