Local ordinance law in the U.S. is technically public but practically unusable as a national research corpus because it's fragmented across incompatible vendor platforms with no central index, which is why LOCUS had to be built.

UC Berkeley researchers built LOCUS, a ~2.2-million-row corpus of U.S. municipal ordinances, because local law is fragmented across incompatible vendor platforms with no central registry mapping jurisdictions to their hosting systems. ✦ AI generated

UC Berkeley researchers · Import AI · 2026-06-29 · original ↗

U.S. local codes are fragmented across commercial vendor platforms designed for in-browser reading rather than bulk research access. Vendors expose different navigation structures, print workflows, dynamically generated PDFs, and jurisdiction indexes. No central registry maps every county or municipality to its hosting platform, and no vendor provides a complete machine-readable index of all jurisdictions it hosts

Read full article ↗excerpt · fair-use quotation