Court denies woman’s ‘putative marriage’ bid

A Namibian woman who married a man not yet divorced hoped to find the courts sympathetic to her plea that this was a ‘putative marriage’. She needed to persuade the courts that she didn’t know he was still married to someone else at the time. Otherwise, because he had died intestate, she wouldn’t be able to inherit from his estate. But, as Carmel Rickard explains in her A Matter of Justice column on the Legalbrief site, the courts haven’t been impressed by her claim that she was ignorant of the fact that he was still married when they married. And this in turn means she loses her chance to inherit from his estate.

A Matter of Justice

Namibia judgment