Visualizing laws and their characteristics

Visualize Laws turns legal text into something you can map, search, sort, and compare. Each law is scored across opacity, enforcement discretion, paternalism, and problem salience — four ways of seeing how a rule reads, what it permits, and what problem it is trying to solve.

Three layers of U.S. law, starting local

U.S. law operates across federal, state, and local layers. This first version begins with local law because LOCUS-v1 provides a uniquely broad, structured corpus of ordinances from cities and counties across the country.

A local ordinance is a law made by a city or county, applying inside that jurisdiction. It is the hyper-local fine print governing everything from zoning and business licensing to backyard chickens and late-night noise. Local rules remain subject to state and federal law.

What they actually govern

Dull name, surprisingly personal reach. Local codes usually cover:

• Zoning & land usewhat you can build — and whether your block gets a taco truck
• Noisequiet hours, and how early the leaf blower may legally ruin a Saturday
• Parkingstreet-sweeping tickets, permit zones, snow-emergency towing
• Building codesso the deck stays a deck and not a headline
• Animal controlleash laws, pet limits, the eternal “are chickens allowed?” debate
• Business licensingrestaurants, vendors, and the neighbor’s Airbnb empire
• Public health & safetysmoking bans, pool fences, food-truck rules
• Property maintenancetall grass, junk cars, and the right to be annoyed by both

Why bother with them at all?

Because a dense city and a rural town want wildly different things. One needs rules for short-term rentals and 2 a.m. noise; the other cares about ATVs and livestock. Local ordinances let every community write its own fine print — as long as it doesn't break the bigger rules.

Current coverage: LOCUS-v1

The catch: these laws are public, but they're scattered across thousands of clunky vendor sites. LOCUS rounded up ~2.2 million of them into a single local-law corpus. That dataset is the starting point for Visualize Laws; state and federal laws are not included yet.

Where the map goes next

The long-term goal is to make local, state, and federal law explorable through the same visual system. Planned coverage begins with financial regulation: securities laws, money-transmission laws, the Investment Company Act and related regulation, banking law, and adjacent areas of financial services.

Starting there supports research and infrastructure for financial products and tokenized securities, where understanding how overlapping rules differ across jurisdictions is especially useful.

This is the roadmap, not current coverage. Today's searchable corpus remains LOCUS-v1 local ordinances.

@article{peskoff2026freeing,
  title={Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States},
  author={Peskoff, Denis and Barrow, Joe and Vu, Christopher and Davenport, Diag},
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.19334},
  year={2026}
}