Thomas McSweeney is a 2005 graduate of Cornell Law School. After law school, he continued his research on law in the Ph.D. program in the Department of History at Cornell, where he received fellowships from the Mellon Foundation and the Huntington Library as well as three awards for his teaching. He is interested in what the study of 13th-century England and France, a world that was just beginning to use conceptual categories like property and contract, can tell us about modern law. His current project, Property before Property, 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 the legal treatises of the 13th century. 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.