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.
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