Professor Rebecca Probert

Professor Rebecca Probert is Professor of Law and a leading expert in the history and current law of marriage, cohabitation, bigamy, and divorce. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of the Social Sciences, and the Royal Historical Society, and was President of the Society of Legal Scholars for 2019-2020.

Professor Probert read jurisprudence at Oxford and then worked as a Research Assistant at the Law Commission for two years before studying for an LLM at University College, London. She subsequently taught at Aberystwyth (1997-99), Sussex (1999-2002) and Warwick (2002-17) before joining Exeter Law School in April 2017.

In 2015 she was seconded to the Law Commission to work on their scoping paper Getting Married (published in December 2015) and from August 2019 to July 2022 acted as specialist advisor to the Commission on their Weddings Project. From September 2020 to March 2022 she was also a co-investigator on a Nuffield-funded project on non-legally binding wedding ceremonies led by Dr Rajnaara Akhtar, which investigated why marriage ceremonies occur outside the legal framework in England and Wales.

She regularly gives talks to groups of family historians, and has appeared on programmes such as Who Do You Think You Are? and A House Through Time to unravel tricky points of legal history relating to divorce and bigamy.

Professor Probert welcomes applications from research students in any area of contemporary family law or its history, and particularly in areas concerning marriage, cohabitation and bigamy. She is currently co-supervising the following PhD students:

• Alison Talbot, 'The Legal Administration of the Bishops of Worcester and Exeter, 1200-1500' (with Anthony Musson)
• Godfred Diawuo, 'The role of Ghanaian Akan Customary Marriage within the Common Law Jurisdiction' (with Stacey Hynd)
• Sharon Blake, 'The role of autonomy and legality in the form and formalisation of contemporary couple relationships in England and Wales: All heart no head?'