This guy collected every local law in America and put them in a single database.
2.2 million laws.
This might seem to you like some nerds side project, and while it is technically, it is also much more important than you think.
Historically, whenever anything is made transparent to the voting bloc it undergoes radical change.
Every. Single. Time.
To the extent governments work overtime to make things opaque. (And I expect that to happen to this dataset too very soon, in a thousand different ways.)
The internet makes everything including politics “global/local” and local laws won’t escape.
It’s hard to understand right now how profound this will be, but we live in interesting times for sure.
Thank you Joe, and all the other nerds who do stuff like this because they are personally curious and they can. This is how history moves forwards
Joe Barrow (@barrowjoseph)
New paper: every law in America is technically public. But not really, until now!
With @DenisPeskoff at UC Berkeley, we built a corpus of ~every publicly accessibly city and county law, and released a huge chunk of it!
2.2 million laws, you're (probably) covered in it!
🧵
— https://nitter.net/barrowjoseph/status/2067993371541492025#m