Professional Biography

Thomas McSweeney is a graduate of Cornell Law School. After law school, he continued his research on law in the Ph.D. program in History at Cornell, where he received research fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the Huntington Library as well as three awards for his teaching. Professor McSweeney’s research focuses on the connections between the early common law and medieval civil law. The authors of legal texts of the thirteenth century were just beginning to use conceptual categories like property and contract, categories which they adopted and adapted from the civil law to suit the needs of English courts. His book manuscript, tentatively titled, Priests of Justice: The Civil Law’s Role in the Development of the Early Common Law, looks at the ways English justices began to transform the administrative practices of the royal courts into a legal system using civil law as their model. His article, English Judges and Roman Jurists: The Civilian Learning Behind England’s First Case Law, which will appear in the August 2012 issue of the Temple Law Review, focuses on the textual practices of the justices; they began to read and write the records of the royal courts differently in an attempt to transform them into a learned legal literature in the civil law mold. Property Before Property: Romanizing the English Law of Land, which will appear in the August 2012 issue of the Buffalo law review, looks at the collision between the newly rediscovered Roman language of property and Anglo-French conceptions of the relationship between people and their land in medieval legal treatises. Professor McSweeney has also done work in Islamic law and is in the process of completing a casebook of Islamic law with Professor David Powers.