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Atlas Civica

The data-journalism layer

The shape of American local law

Every labeled section carries four scores — how opaque, strict, paternalistic, and discretionary it is. Rolled up by geography and subject, they let you compare the character of law across the country.

38%
Avg. opacity
0–100, national
49%
Avg. strictness
Atlas dimension
75%
Substantive
Rules ∪ Enforcement
28k
Labeled sections

By state

Choose a dimension to re-rank. Live from the rollup cube.

  • North Carolina 80
  • South Dakota 80
  • Ohio 70
  • Nebraska 58
  • Virginia 55
  • Florida 54
  • Arizona 52
  • Alaska 48
  • Wisconsin 47
  • Pennsylvania 44
  • Minnesota 43
  • New York 43
  • Oregon 42
  • Texas 40
  • Washington 36

Higher = more opaque. n = sections behind each state’s score; small-n states omitted.

Most-regulated subjects

By sections tagged, across the labeled corpus.

What sections do

Five-class function distribution.

Context 44%
Rules 38%
Process 12%
Enforcement 6%
How the labels work →

Scores are 0–1 model estimates (llama-3.3-70b teacher labels), intended for distillation into a ModernBERT classifier at full scale. They’re directional, not legal advice.

Query the analytics API