Rebecca Jane Probert, FBA (born 1973) is a British legal historian and academic.

Born in Rugby, Warwickshire, she lives in Exeter with her husband, the travel writer Liam D'Arcy-Brown. She studied for an undergraduate degree in Jurisprudence at Oxford University and for an LLM at University College, London. She currently holds a chair in Law at Exeter University. Specialising as she does in the history of marriage in England and Wales, her monograph Marriage Law & Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment[1] is widely accepted among legal historians as having overturned previous understandings of the history of common law marriage.[2] She is also the author of a number of leading text books such as Cretney & Probert's Family Law and Principles of Family Law.

Probert has appeared widely on television and radio, notably including interviews for Channel 4 news during the controversy surrounding the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles and on BBC1's Who Do You Think You Are?,[3] in which she threw light on the bigamous marriage of the actress Kim Cattrall's grandfather.

In the run-up to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in 2011, Probert published The Rights & Wrongs of Royal Marriage: how the law has led to heartbreak, farce and confusion, and why it must be changed,[4] in which she argued the case for rationalising and simplifying the laws which govern royal marriages in Great Britain.

In 2022, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.[5]

References

  1. ↑ Probert, Rebecca, Marriage Law & Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment, Cambridge University Press, 2009.
  2. ↑ Book reviews, Family Law, February 2010.
  3. ↑ Who Do You Think You Are?, BBC, 12 August 2009.
  4. ↑ Probert, Rebecca, The Rights & Wrongs of Royal Marriage: how the law has led to heartbreak, farce and confusion, and why it must be changed, Takeaway Publishing, 2011.
  5. ↑ "Record number of women elected to the British Academy". The British Academy. 22 July 2022. Retrieved 15 August 2022.
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