British legal historian (born 1973)
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.[ 4]
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 ,[ 5] 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,[ 6] and in 2024 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society .[ 7]
References
^ Probert, Rebecca. (2009) Marriage Law & Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment . Cambridge University Press . ISBN 9781139479769.
^ Book reviews, Family Law , February 2010.
^ Who Do You Think You Are? , BBC , 12 August 2009.
^ "BBC One - Who Do You Think You Are?, Series 6, Kim Cattrall" . BBC . Retrieved 28 September 2024 .
^ Probert, Rebecca. (2011) The Rights & Wrongs of Royal Marriage: how the law has led to heartbreak, farce and confusion, and why it must be changed. Takeaway Publishing.
^ "Record number of women elected to the British Academy" . The British Academy . 22 July 2022. Retrieved 15 August 2022 .
^ "Professor Rebecca Probert made a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society" . Exeter Law School . 6 June 2024. Retrieved 28 September 2024 .
External links
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