In a guest post, Rajnaara C Akhtar, Rebecca Probert and Sharon Blake look at the reform of weddings law in England and Wales.
It has long been recognized that the law governing the process of getting married needs reform. Following on from Getting married: a scoping paper, published in December 2015, in September 2020 the Law Commission published Getting Married: A Consultation Paper on Weddings Law, setting out a series of provisional reform proposals for weddings law. An empirical study conducted by us[1] titled ‘When is a wedding not a marriage? Exploring non-legally binding ceremonies’ investigated wedding ceremonies taking place outside of the legal framework which reflected a variety of faiths, beliefs and non-beliefs. Drawing on the extensive data we gathered from September 2020 to May 2021, a Briefing Paper for the Law Commission has been published this week analysing the potential impact of the Commission’s proposals for reform. We present an overview of our findings here.