When you refer to "laws" here, you mistakenly assumed that all "laws" are statutes (laws adopted through the legislature / political process). Statutes are adopted and/or changed over time and the necessity of legislative history has changed with society. There are many statutes that are never changed simply because they are not controversial. There are many "code books" which contain the type of information requested here.
In any common law country (essentially any country which speaks English, including the US), the bulk of the law is judge-made law and/or interpretations of statutes in the context of actual cases or controversies. These are generally known as legal precedents and they have the power of law.
The entire purpose of legal research -- fundamental to any legal brief -- is to find either a statute or, better yet, a recent legal precedent applying the statute in the context of a similar or identical situation. Brief-writing is generally taught in law schools as a mandatory course; brief-writing is a very high-end skill that many attorneys never master; this is why appeals law is itself a legal specialty.
The main components of any common law jurisdiction's law library are books of the statutes which are commonly annotated (i.e. the statutory language is following by citations to relevant case precedents) and volumes of case precedents, generally organized by date and findable by the volume number, the series name of the relevant courts, and the starting page number. These materials can be contained in thousands of volumes, with significant differences among jurisdictions; all of these materials are now well organized and online.
The contents of statutes and cases are always in the public domain, free and online; most of the attorney-level materials are produced by private publishers who may add editorial content that is very helpful to an attorney.
For example in California, where I have practiced for over 40 years, a minimum physical law library would include probably about 1500 volumes, although nobody I know would subscribe to physical books today. Everybody uses commercial online services. Statutes have, for many decades, a legislative history which is prepared by legislative staff, are generally included in annotated books of statutes. I bought my own set about 30 years ago, at great expense, but today I consider those books pretty backdrop (clients are very impressed) but useless.
Please keep in mind that the practices and laws of each jurisdiction may differ; indeed, their differences are direct manifestations of the sovereignty of that jurisdiction.