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This is the story of four weddings and an annulment that was finally subject to judgment last month in the Family Court of Australia.

Mr Tristan (a pseudonym used in the law report) describes himself as “an old-fashioned guy”. He was married in 1966 but the marriage failed; later he met a Hawaiian woman and fell in love. They got married and decided to live in Hawaii. But they were prevented from resettling by the US Department of Homeland Security, which revealed that the marriage to the Hawaiian woman was invalid because Mr Tristan was already married. When he pointed out that he had divorced his 1966 wife, they said, no, not her, the second woman you married in Arizona in 1978.

It was at this point that a shocked Mr Tristan said he did dimly recall a “nice blonde woman” and a 28-day party in Arizona while he was on shore leave as an oil rig cook in 1978, although he couldn’t remember many details. Shown the 1978 Arizona marriage licence by which he had wed Ms Ernt (a legal pseudonym), he said “the sky fell in”. He tried to track down his Arizona girl but could discover only that she had got married again in 1993, bigamously if she had not previously divorced him.

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At the Family Court, Justice Brown granted Mr Tristan an annulment of his 1978 marriage, saying that “he has no recollection of going through any ceremony of marriage . . . or of discussing marriage, or of anything referable to marriage”. That debauched revelry he had attended in 1978 must have been quite a bender.

Historically, English law was strict in enforcing the law against bigamy, the offence of marrying someone while already married. In five cases for which there was a guilty verdict in 1753, for example, the punishment was branding. These days, the average sentence is six months.

But back in an age when, for the judiciary, political correctness meant opposing the vote for women, Lord Russell, the 19th-century Lord Chief Justice, was once asked what was the punishment for bigamy. Without any hesitation the judge replied: “Two mothers-in-law”.

Professor Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at The Open University. His recent book How the Law Works is published by HarperCollins

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