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 was 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 was equally shared by all participating national GLIN stations. Anyone with Internet connections could 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.
GLIN was initiated by the Law Library of Congress in 1991. The Network celebrated its 15th anniversary in September 2008. As of 2015 the database was no longer accessible.[1]