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About this paper
Denis Peskoff, Joe Barrow, Christopher Vu, Diag Davenport
A machine-readable corpus, LOCUS, comprising over 2.2 million U.S. municipal and county ordinance codes is presented, making previously fragmented local law accessible for computational analysis. The work also demonstrates a multi-dimensional scoring system for legal characteristics with high correlation to expert judgments.
Key insights
- Local ordinances exhibit discernible structural patterns when observed at scale, including a functional division between city and county codes and recurring architectural sequences of topics.
- Dimensional analysis reveals that characteristics like opacity and paternalism are weakly correlated, indicating they represent distinct and independent aspects of local laws.
- Significant geographic and jurisdictional variations exist in legal characteristics, such as counties being more opaque than cities on average, and specific states like Florida showing disproportionately high opacity.
Summary by alphaXiv.
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