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Here, laws are written by legislation, and interpreted by judges. As judges rule on different laws, the laws build up a case history. This is why becoming a lawyer in the US (especially if you want to be a trial lawyer) is so onerous. Not only do you need to be very familiar with the laws themselves - you have to be very familiar with how the laws have been interpreted since enactment.

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Is there one single repository that links each law to cases that have referenced or interpreted it?

AFAIK, no. There are the Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis databases, but I'm not sure if even they can be called completely authoritative.

(And access to them is certainly not free.)

The implications are a bit disturbing. Paid access to those databases combined with case law means that if you are poor then you won't have full information about what can get you jailed.

Yep.

Even if you are rich, case law alone is so onerously large that perusing it and studying it would take a lifetime. I spent about ten minutes trying to find out just how large the corpus of case law is, and could find no references.

Score one for the little guy, though: Google Scholar indexes (some; not sure how much of the corpus is covered) case law, as of Nov. 17, '09: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/finding-laws-that-gov...

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