What’s Up with the Bronze Plates in the Library?

What are those bronze pages at the entrance to the law library?  They are a sculpture by artist Jim Sanborn.  The pages are the artist’s visual history of the written law tracing the emergence of systems of justice in many cultures beginning with the sixth century BCE laws of Solon and ending with US Supreme Court decisions from the 20th Century.  Notable excerpts include the Chinese Code of T’ang (600), the Magna Carta (1240), the Iroquois Nations’ Book of the Great Law (1450), Marbury v. Madison (1802), Plessy v Ferguson (1872), and Furman v. State of Georgia (1972).  There are 14 bronze plates in all.