Robert E. & Elizabeth S. Scott Professor and Professor of Law
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 J. McSweeney earned his B.A. from William & Mary, where he was a James Monroe Scholar. He continued his studies at Cornell University, where he earned a J.D. and a Ph.D. in medieval history. He has won a number of awards in his time at William & Mary, including the Plumeri Award for Faculty Excellence (2018), the Walter Williams Award for Excellence in Teaching (2019), the Robert and Elizabeth Scott Research Professorship (2020), the 1L Professor of the Year Award (2021), the William & Mary Alumni Association's Faculty Fellowship Award (2022), and the McGlothlin Award for Exceptional Teaching (2025).
Professor McSweeney's research focuses on the early history of the English 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, examines the ways in which thirteenth-century justices 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 an elected member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Professor McSweeney also sits on the board of directors of the Ames Foundation at Harvard Law School, which funds research in legal history, and in November of 2021 began a five-year term as an editor for Cambridge Studies in Legal History, the American Society for Legal History's book series at Cambridge University Press.
A devoted alumnus of William & Mary, Professor McSweeney has also written on the history of the college. His article "A University in 1693," co-authored with law students Katharine Ello and Elsbeth O'Brien, argues that William & Mary was awarded the status of a university in its 1693 charter, and thus has a claim to the title of oldest university in the United States.
Publications from 2023
Appealing Magna Carta, Thomas J. McSweeney
(91 University of Chicago Law Review Online (2023))Publications from 2018
Fiction in the Code: Reading Legislation as Literature, Thomas J. McSweeney
(34 Georgia State University Law Review 581-629 (2018))Publications from 2016
Book Review of The Oxford History of the Laws of England, Volume II, Thomas J. McSweeney
(34 Law and History Review 227-228 (2016))Creating a Literature for the King’s Courts in the Later Thirteenth Century: Hengham Magna, Fet Asaver, and Bracton, Thomas J. McSweeney
(37 Journal of Legal History 41-71 (2016))Publications from 2015
The Significance of the Corpus Juris Civilis: Matilda of Canossa and the Revival of Roman Law, Thomas J. McSweeney and Michéle K. Spike
(Matilda of Canossa and the Origins of the Renaissance: An Exhibition in Honor of the 900th Anniversary of Her Death p. 21-29 (2015))Publications from 2014
Magna Carta and the Right to Trial by Jury, Thomas J. McSweeney
(Magna Carta: Muse and Mentor, 139-157 (Randy J. Holland, ed., Thomson Reuters, 2014))Magna Carta, Civil Law, and Canon Law, Thomas J. McSweeney
(Magna Carta and the Rule of Law (Andrea Martinez, Daniel B. Magraw Jr., Roy Edmund Brownell II, eds., 2014))Publications from 2013
Between England and France: A Cross-Channel Legal Culture in the Late Thirteenth Century, Thomas J. McSweeney
(Law, Governance, and Justice: New Views on Medieval Constitutionalism (Richard Kaeuper ed., 2013))Publications from 2012
English Justices and Roman Jurists: The Civilian Learning Behind England's First Case Law, Thomas J. McSweeney
(84 Temple Law Review 827-862 (2012))Property Before Property: Romanizing the English Law of Land, Thomas J. McSweeney
(60 Buffalo Law Review 1139-1199 (2012))