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New LOCUS corpus unlocks U.S. local ordinances for AI research · 2 sources tracked

By PulseAugur Editorial · [3 sources] ·

Researchers have developed LOCUS, a comprehensive corpus of U.S. local ordinances, aiming to make this critical layer of American law accessible for large-scale research and AI applications. The corpus includes codes from over 9,000 cities and counties, with a harmonized layer covering the majority of the U.S. population. To process the diverse document formats, optical character recognition (OCR) was employed. Additionally, the project trained ModernBERT-based classifiers to analyze local laws for dimensions like opacity and paternalism, which have not been studied at this scale. AI

IMPACT Enables large-scale analysis of local laws, potentially uncovering new insights into regulatory practices and their societal impact.

RANK_REASON The cluster contains an academic paper detailing a new dataset and models for legal AI research.

Read on arXiv cs.CL →

AI-generated summary · Google Gemini · from 3 sources. How we write summaries →

New LOCUS corpus unlocks U.S. local ordinances for AI research · 2 sources tracked

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COVERAGE [3]

  1. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Denis Peskoff, Joe Barrow, Christopher Vu, Diag Davenport ·

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

    arXiv:2606.19334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Loca…

  2. arXiv cs.CL TIER_1 English(EN) · Diag Davenport ·

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

    Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensi…

  3. Hugging Face Daily Papers TIER_1 English(EN) ·

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

    A comprehensive corpus and access layer for U.S. local ordinance codes has been developed to enable machine-readable legal AI research, addressing the lack of authoritative legal text at scale for local regulations.

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