The Law Library of Congress holds the single most comprehensive and authoritative collection of domestic, foreign, and international legal materials in the world.

There were repeated efforts to extend the use of what was generally called "The Congress Library" to other government officials and especially to the federal judiciary.

The first three decades of the nineteenth century saw repeated unsuccessful attempts to establish a separate Law Library to serve both Congress and the Supreme Court.

The Law Library thus acquired its own appropriation and budget line, as well as a statutory relationship with the Supreme Court that would endure until 1935.

This cockpit, dim-lighted and inconvenient, ... is expected to accommodate the justices, lawyers engaged in cases, the members of the bar in search of light, as well as law students."

Service was limited by crowding, short hours, and a small staff who were obligated to serve Congress and the Supreme Court before anyone else.

For the next several decades major publications on the laws of Spain, France, the larger Latin American countries, Eastern Europe and East Asia were produced, usually with support from various foundations or government agencies.

Their numbers were augmented by sets of temporary workers employed on specific projects and funded either by grants from foundations or by one-time Congressional appropriations.

From 1949 to 1960 the National Committee for a Free Europe supported a staff of 12 lawyers from Eastern European and Baltic countries then under Communist rule.

The staff of foreign-trained attorneys has, over the years since the late 1940s, included former judges, private practitioners, diplomats and legislative drafters.

In fact, the foreign attorneys play a significant role in developing the collection, selecting the most relevant texts and serials for the jurisdictions they cover.

In 1981, the library's collections were moved across Independence Avenue to the sub-basement of the recently constructed James Madison Memorial Building.

[5] Moving the library's 1.6 million volumes took four months, and a new reading room opened in April 1981 on the second floor of the Madison building.

[5] By 2002, the Madison building stacks were full, and additional materials were sent to the Library of Congress' High Density Storage Facility in Fort Meade, Maryland.

Indexes and other finding aids are indispensable tools for legal research, but the laws of many countries are not well-indexed or available in authoritative or up-to-date codes or collections.

The first major project of the Law Library was the 1907–1910 preparation of an index to United States federal statutes, an endeavor funded by a special Congressional appropriation.

He noted that "If accompanied by a reference to preceding statutes or by brief abstracts ... it may become an instrument of the highest value not merely to the theoretic investigator, but to the practical legislator".

One institutional solution arrived at was an international, cooperative network that makes indexes, abstracts and the complete text of new laws available over the Internet.

This product, which is now inactive, was the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN), and was coordinated by the Law Library of Congress.