Rajnaara Chowdhury Akhtar

Dr Rajnaara Chowdhury Akhtar is a socio-legal scholar specialising in family law. Her research explores multiple intersections of family law including gender, children and minoritised communities, and engages with broader issues including family justice processes, transitional relationship norms, normative influences, legal consequences, and individual autonomy. Underpinned by Critical Legal Theory, her work draws on a range of socio-legal methodologies. Rajnaara is renowned for her particular expertise in marriage formalities and the legal treatment of non-legally binding religious-only marriages within state legal systems.

She has conducted extensive empirical research in the UK, Qatar, Australia and South Africa, focusing on how individuals and families engage with law and legal systems. Rajnaara has led several grant-funded projects as Principal Investigator (PI) including a Nuffield Foundation-funded study examining why some marriage ceremonies in England and Wales take place outside the legal framework, and a Doha International Family Institute-funded project on women’s experiences navigating marriage and divorce laws in Qatar. She has recently been awarded a grant from the Nuffield Foundation as PI for a collaborative interdisciplinary study Exploring the Child Arrangements of Separated Families.

Her interdisciplinary and international collaborations span law, sociology, anthropology and theology, and her work has been published across academic journals in these fields. She regularly presents her research at academic conferences, practitioner forums, and policy events involving government and other stakeholders. Rajnaara has provided expert evidence to the Law Commission of England and Wales on weddings law reform.