Tying the Knot

Rebecca Probert is a Professor at the School of Law, University of Exeter, and Specialist Consultant to the Law Commission's Weddings Project. She is author of Marriage Law and Practice in the Long Eighteenth Century: A Reassessment (2009) and The Changing Legal Regulation of Cohabitation: From Fornicators to Family, 1600-2010 (2012).

• 1. Introduction; 2. Conception, design and implementation, 1819–1837; 3. Reactions to the Act, 1837–1854; 4. Amendments enacted and reform deferred, 1855–1872; 5. Differences, divisions, and dispensing with the registrar, 1873–1899; 6. Competing conceptions of marriage, 1900–1919; 7. Consolidating complexity, 1920–1949; 8. Convergence? 1950–1993; 9. The rise of the wedding, 1994–2020; 10. The legacy of the past and lessons for the future.

'With reform of weddings law back on the agenda, Rebecca Probert's fascinating study underscores how recourse to history can show that while the contexts has changed, the problems we face are not new and that reform is needed to untangle this knotty area of law. This is an exemplar of what historically informed legal analysis can achieve and deserves to be widely read by legal historians and family lawyers alike.' Russell Sandberg, Cardiff University