Professor

Thomas

J.

McSweeney

Thomas McSweeney's research focuses on the early history of the common law. He is particularly interested in the ways the judges and lawyers of the thirteenth century taught and learned the law. His book, Priests of the Law: Roman Law and the Making of the Common Law's First Professionals (Oxford University Press 2019), which was awarded an honorable mention for the Selden Society’s David Yale Prize for an “outstanding contribution to the history of the law of England and Wales,” is about the Bracton treatise and its authors, and examines the ways in which the justices who wrote Bracton modelled their practices on those of the jurists of Roman law to make the case that the English common law was part of a pan-European legal culture. He is a member of the board of directors of the Ames Foundation, which funds research in legal history, and in November of 2021 began a five-year term as an editor for the American Society for Legal History’s book series, Studies in Legal History, at Cambridge University Press.