法律AI研究者有福了！LOCUS提供了9,239个美国地方法规的机器可读语料，还附带了基于ModernBERT的分析工具，解决碎片化问题。
LOCUS是美国首个大规模地方法规语料库，收录9,239个市县的法典。该数据集通过OCR处理了多种文档格式，覆盖3,144个县中的2,309个，覆盖多数美国人口。研究团队训练了基于ModernBERT的分类器，用于分析法规的模糊性和家长主义等维度。LOCUS-v1及其衍生模型已在Hugging Face上开源。
Freeing the Law with LOCUS: A Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States
Progress in legal AI increasingly depends on access to authoritative legal text at scale. Yet one of the most consequential layers of American law remains largely absent from existing machine-readable corpora: local ordinances. Local codes govern zoning, housing, business licensing, public health, noise, animal control, and many other domains of everyday regulation, but they are fragmented across vendor platforms designed for human browsing rather than bulk research access. We introduce LOCUS - the Local Ordinance Corpus for the United States - a comprehensive corpus and county-harmonized access layer for U.S. municipal and county ordinance codes. The raw corpus, available for release to researchers, represents nearly all publicly available municipal and county ordinance codes. The resulting raw corpus contains codes from 9,239 cities and counties. A smaller county-harmonized LOCUS access layer provides coverage for the largest 2,309 of 3,144 U.S. counties, accounting for a majority of the population. We use OCR to handle the myriad of document formats that have kept the law from being a public resource. We release the corpus with coverage metadata to support reproducibility, downstream legal AI research, and the incremental expansion of machine-readable access to local law. We train a collection of ModernBERT-based classifiers and scorers to facilitate analyzing U.S. local law among several dimensions, such as opacity and paternalism, that have not previously been studied at this scale. LOCUS-v1 and its derivative models are available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/LocalLaws/LOCUS-v1