A census of free local law
Most US local law is dark.
We’re lighting it up
.
Atlas Civica maps every US city and county to the effort to free its municipal code — then harvests, normalizes, diffs, and serves that law as a live, searchable, queryable engine. The gaps are the headline.
US jurisdictions, dark vs. lit — live
Built for everyone who needs the law to be legible
One corpus, five jobs.
Find your town
Look up your city or county and see whether its law is free — and read it if it is.
Explore → JournalistsCompare the country
Maps and rankings of how opaque, strict, or paternalistic local law is, state by state.
Explore → ResearchersThe corpus + ML labels
LOCUS-parity function/normative labels, a 42-subject taxonomy, and a bulk dataset.
Explore → BuildersThe metered API
Normalized, versioned municipal law as JSON — semantic search, diffs, coverage.
Explore →Census-first, not footnote-first
The dark places are the point.
Other projects publish the law that’s already easy to get. We start from the full Census universe of 22,628 jurisdictions and treat every gap as a target. As the engine harvests, the map lights up — and you can watch where local law is still inaccessible to its own residents.
How the engine works- 1
Harvest
Pull codified law from 7 vendor platforms — Municode, eCode360, American Legal, and more — directly, no OCR.
- 2
Normalize
Map every section to the Atlas Civica Format: stable URN, FRBR work/expression, content hash.
- 3
Diff & version
Re-crawl on a cadence; content-hash diffs turn every change into a queryable, dated event.
- 4
Classify
LOCUS-style function + normative scores + a 42-subject taxonomy + semantic vectors.
- 5
Serve
A metered API, semantic search, an analytics cube, and this public atlas.
Use the data.
Free tier for evaluation. Metered API for builders. Bulk dataset for researchers.