Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States

The article announces the release of LOCUS, a Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States, which provides a comprehensive machine-readable dataset of municipal and county ordinance codes from 9,239 jurisdictions. This corpus includes a county-harmonized access layer for the 2,309 largest counties, facilitating bulk research access to local laws that were previously fragmented and difficult to analyze. The release employs OCR technology to standardize diverse document formats and includes trained ModernBERT-based classifiers to enable nuanced legal analysis, supporting advancements in legal AI research and improving access to local regulations for practitioners.