Thomas J. McSweeney

Areas of Specialization

Legal History-Early History of the Common Law, Common Law's Relationship to Civil Law, History of Lawyers; Property Law; Trusts and Estates

Representative Professional Activities and Achievements

Thomas McSweeney earned his B.A. from the College of William and Mary, where he was a James Monroe Scholar, and continued his studies at Cornell University, where he earned a J.D./LL.M. as part of Cornell's program in international and comparative law and a Ph.D. in history. After completing his Ph.D., Professor McSweeney worked for two years as a visiting assistant professor at Cornell Law School, teaching property and legal history. During his time at Cornell, he won three awards for his teaching and was awarded research grants to work at the Huntington Library, the British Library, and the British National Archives. In 2014, Professor McSweeney was selected to present his work at the Law & Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop, convened jointly by the law schools at Georgetown, Columbia, USC, and UCLA. In 2015, he was selected as a fellow of the American Society for Legal History’s Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History.

Professor McSweeney's research focuses on the first century and a half of the common law, the period between the establishment of the writ system in the 1160s and 1170s and the end of the thirteenth century. He is particularly interested in the ways a fledgling professional judicial bench began to schematize the work they were doing in the courts using Roman law as their framework. His published articles have explored the legal-literary culture that developed throughout Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He is currently working on a book on the justices who wrote the Bracton treatise in the thirteenth century and their struggles to define themselves as England's first legal professionals through their writing.

Scholarly Publications