FAQ

How do you get the data?

Legal codes are not copyrightable and are in the public domain. The Supreme Court confirmed this in Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org (2020). Codes are almost always hosted by one of several publishers, who do not charge for access. We retrieve the text from these publishers and make it available in a structured, machine-readable format.

What do publishers do?

Publishers help cities handle conflicts between ordinances, ensure everything is properly formatted, and manage the actual publication process. It is a valuable service that cities pay for. We are not replacing or competing with that service.

Why Open Legal Codes?

We like publishers — but they don't make it easy to get codes to humans or AI agents. We believe being able to access what the law actually says is critical to our society. Open Legal Codes makes that access simple and free.

Who made this?

This is offered free of charge by TIDY, an AI property management company. We saw firsthand how hard it was to just get the text of regulations, so we built a solution and decided to open it up to the world.

How current is the data?

Content is fetched on first request and cached. The cache records when each section was last retrieved. We don't do full versioning — we show the current text as of the last fetch.

What jurisdictions are covered?

See the coverage map. We support any jurisdiction published through Municode (~4,000), American Legal (~3,500), eCode360 (~4,400), plus federal regulations and California state statutes.

Is there an API?

Yes. No signup required. See the Developers page for REST API, MCP server, CLI, and Claude Code integration.