Rebecca Jane Probert, (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]