Directly answering the question: no, not every country has such a consolidated library that enumerates all the laws of that country. And for reasons, I suspect no such library could ever exist in any real-life country.

I do like this question, and it warrants further discussion about laws (and rules, and norms), how they’re enacted and enforced, and how different jurisdictions apply the procedural machine that is their body of law.

To start, I will be writing from a California/USA perspective, with side-quests into general Anglo-American concepts. That said, the continental European system of civil law also provides good contrast for how similar yet different the “law” can be. Going further abroad will yield even more distinctions, but I only have so much space in a Lemmy comment.

The first question to examine is: what is the point of having laws? Some valid (and often overlapping) answers:

• Laws describe what is/isn’t acceptable to a society, reflecting its moral ideals
• Laws incentivize or punish certain activities, in pursuit of public policy
• Laws set the terms for how individuals interact with each other, whether in trade or in personal life
• Laws establish a procedure machine, so that by turning the crank, the same answer will output consistently

From these various intentions, we might be inclined to think that “the law” should be some sort of all-encompassing tome that necessarily specifies all aspects of human life, not unlike an ISO standard. But that is only one possible way to meet the goals of “the law”. If instead, we had a book of “principles” and those principles were the law, then applying those principles to scenarios would yield similar result. That said, exactly how a principle like “do no harm” is applied to “whether pineapple belongs on pizza” is not as clear-cut as one might want “the law” to be. Indeed, it is precisely the intersection of all these objectives for “the law” that makes it so complicated. And that’s even before we look at unwritten laws.

The next question would be: are all laws written down? In the 21st Century, in most jurisdictions, the grand majority of new laws are recorded as written statutes. But just because it’s written down doesn’t mean it’s very specific. This is the same issue from earlier with having “principles” as law: what exactly does the USA Constitution’s First Amendment mean by “respecting an establishment of religion”, to use an example. But by not micromanaging every single detail of daily life, a document that starts with principles and is then refined by statute law, that’s going to be a lot more flexible over the centuries. For better/worse, the USA Constitution encodes mostly principles and some hard rules, but otherwise leaves a lot of details left for Congress to fill in.

Flexibility is sometimes a benefit for a system of law, although it also opens the door for abuse. For example, I recall a case from the UK many years ago, where crown prosecutors in London had a tough time finding which laws could be used to prosecute a cyclist that injured a pedestrian. As it turned out, because of the way that vehicular laws were passed in the 20th Century, all the laws on “road injuries” basically required the use of an automobile, and so that meant there was a hole in the law, when it came to charging bicyclists. They ended up charging the cyclist with the criminal offense of “furious driving”, which dated back to an 1860s statute, which criminalized operating on the public road with “fury” (aka intense anger).

One could say that the law was abused, because such an old statute shouldn’t be used to apply to modern-day circumstances. That said, the bicycle was invented in the 1820s or 1830s. But one could also say that having a catch-all law is important to make sure the law doesn’t have any holes.

Returning to American law, it’s important to note that when there is non-specific law, it is up to the legislative body to fill those gaps. But for the same flexibility reasons, Congress or the state or tribal legislatures might want to confer some flexibility on how certain laws are applied. They can imbue “discretion” upon an agency (eg USA Department of Commerce) or to a court (eg Superior Court of California). At other times, they write the law so that “good judgement” must be exercised.

As those terms are used, discretion more-or-less means having a free choice, where either is acceptable but try to keep within reasonable guidelines. Whereas “good judgement” means the guidelines are enforced and there’s much less wiggle-room for arbitraryness. And confusingly so, sometimes there’s both a component of discretion and judgment, which usually means Congress really didn’t know what else to write.

Some examples: a District Attorney anywhere in California has discretion when it comes to filing criminal charges. They could outright choose to not prosecute person A for bank robbery, but proceed with prosecuting person B for bank robbery, even though they were working together on the same robbery. As an elected official, the DA is supposed to weigh the prospects of actually obtaining a guilty verdict, as well as whether such prosecution would be beneficial to the public or a good use of the DA office’s limited time and budget. Is it a bad look when a DA prosecutes one person but not another? Yes. Are there any guardrails? Yes: a DA cannot abuse their discretion by considering disallowed factors, such as a person’s race or other immutable characteristics. But otherwise, the DA has broad discretion, and ultimately it’s the voters that hold the DA to account.

Another example: the USA Environmental Protection Agency’s Administrator is authorized by the federal Clean Air Act to grant a waiver of the supremacy of federal automobile emissions laws, to the state of California. That is to say, federal law on automobile emissions is normally the law of the land and no US State is allowed to write their own laws on automobile emissions. However, because of the smog crisis in the 70/80s, the feds considered that California was a special basket-case and thus needed their own specific laws that were more stringent than federal emissions laws. Thus, California would need to seek a waiver from the EPA to write these more stringent laws, because the blanket rule was “no state can write such laws”. The federal Clean Air Act explicitly says only California can have this waiver, and it must be renewed regularly by the EPA, and that California cannot dip below the federal standards. The final requirement is that the EPA Administrator shall issue the waiver if California requests it, and if they qualify for it.

This means the EPA Administrator does not have discretion, but rather is exercising good judgement: does California’s waiver application satisfy the requirements outlined in the Clean Air Act? If so, the Administrator must issue the waiver. There is no allowance of an “i don’t wanna” reason for non-issuance of the waiver. The Administrator could only refuse if they show that California is somehow trying to do an end-run around the EPA, such as by trying to reduce the standards.

The third question is: do laws encompass all aspects of everything?. No, laws are only what is legally enforced. There are also rules/by-laws and norms. A rule or by-law is often something enforced by something outside the legal system’s purview. For example, the penalty for violating a by-law of the homeowner’s association might be a revocation of access to the common spaces. For a DnD group, the ultimate penalty for violating a rule might be expulsion.

Meanwhile, there are norms which are things that people generally agree on, but felt were so commonplace that breaking the norm would make everything else nonfunctional. For example, there’s a norm that one does not use all-caps lock when writing an online comment, except to represent emphasis or yelling. One could violate that norm with no real repercussions, but everyone else would dislike you for it, they might not want to engage further with you, they might not give you any benefit of the doubt, they may make adverse inferences about you IRL, or other things.

TL;DR: there are unwritten principles that form part of the law, and there’s no way to record all the different non-law rules and social norms that might apply to any particular situation.