In a guest post, Professor Rebecca Probert looks at some of the complexities around weddings and wedding law in England & Wales during the COVID-19 lockdown.

On 23 March 2020, the Prime Minister announced a raft of measures aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19, declaring that the Government would ‘stop all social events, including weddings, baptisms and other ceremonies.’ While the new regulations did not specifically ban weddings from taking place, the restrictions that they imposed meant that in practice it was not possible for a wedding to take place. Places of worship were required to close except when conducting funerals or broadcasting an act of worship. The vast majority of approved premises were also required to close as a result of the pandemic. Most fundamentally of all, the restrictions on movement and on gatherings of more than two people posed an obvious obstacle to a wedding taking place, even if the number attending had been reduced to the legal minimum. Continue reading →