Legal reform can be challenging due to the volume, complexity, and interdependence of laws, codes, and records. One salient example is racially restrictive covenants. In 2021, California mandated that counties identify and redact such covenants, but implementation has proved challenging, with 84 million pages in Santa Clara County (SCC) alone. Through a partnership with SCC, we develop an open, accurate, and fast language model-based pipeline to solve this problem. Our model is deployable elsewhere with minimal resources, fundamentally altering the cost-benefit calculus of such policy reform. We estimate one in three SCC properties were subject to racial covenants in 1950.
Regulation, Evaluation, and Governance Lab