This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: America is a nation of local laws—millions of them. From noise ordinances and construction codes to rules about fishing licenses and roadside mango peddling, every town, city and county has its own set of regulations and unique way of doing things.
Accessing those laws can be a byzantine quest. Dense PDFs and outdated, inconsistent government websites can make it impossible to easily compare building codes or nuisance laws. For developers, it can make project costs soar.
For residents, it can lead to confusion and frustration. And for researchers, it can stymie efforts to understand how laws are enforced or affect people. A first-of-its-kind project at UC Berkeley is using AI and data science to help untangle this national patchwork by collecting every digitally accessible law in a free, open-access database.
While online repositories have cataloged state and federal statutes for years, the new project is the first such database specifically for local laws, from Alameda, California, to Zephyrhills, Florida. The existence of the new resource opens the door for others to generate custom databases and local chatbots that can quickly generate comparisons of local laws on topics spanning home construction to dog leash laws. "We've built a new kind of telescope—one pointed at governance itself," said Diag Davenport, an assistant professor of technology policy, governance and society at Berkeley and lead researcher on the project.
"It could be a fundamental shift in the way people interact with the rules that govern their daily lives." Davenport, who is part of the Goldman School of Public Policy and the School of Information, started thinking about the project six years ago while studying computer algorithms, systemic bias and the criminal legal system. Around that time, he wondered if he could invert that research focus and study bias in the law itself. To answer that, he needed to study local laws around the country and use statistics to measure how they differed in places that had high levels of historical discrimination compared with those that did not.
That's when he hit the first major problem: No database of all local laws existed. The more he looked, the more he realized they were stored in a mishmash of places, from proprietary company databases to convoluted local government websites. Then there was the scale of the confusion: more than 3,000 counties and another 6,000 or so local jurisdictions that make their own laws.
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