Global Legal Information Network

The Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) is a cooperative, not-for-profit federation of government agencies or their designees that contribute national legal information to the GLIN database. It is an automated database of statutes, regulations and related material that originate from countries in the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia. The data are in a central server at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Access is equally shared by all participating national GLIN stations. Anyone with Internet connections can access summaries of and citations to over 168,000 laws from fifty-one nations, although copyright and distribution-rights issues currently preclude public access to full texts. A distributed network is envisioned, and the database will reside on servers in other member nations as well as the Law Library of Congress.