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CSLS Speaker Series: “When Public Law Is Not Public Knowledge: Making the American Local Legal State Observable”
Monday, August 31, 2026 @ 12:15 pm - 2:00 pm
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Featuring Diag Davenport, Assistant Professor of Technology Policy, Governance, and Society, UC Berkeley
Abstract: Local governments regulate many of the rules that most directly shape daily life, yet their laws have remained fragmented, difficult to compare, and largely invisible to national research. This talk introduces LOCUS, a corpus of 9,239 city and county codes comprising roughly seven million pages; LEXCHEX, which tests whether leading AI systems can reliably answer questions grounded in local law; and new work mapping the accessibility, content, and regulatory form of the American local legal state. Together, these projects expose a gap between law being formally public and becoming usable public knowledge. I will present what the evidence can already establish—and invite discussion about the most important legal, institutional, and democratic questions this new infrastructure should make possible.
Light refreshments will be provided.
Program: 12:45-2:00 p.m. in the Philip Selznick Seminar Room
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