American law codifies an imbalance between married and unmarried Americans. Among the more than one thousand federal rights and benefits afforded to married couples are: getting access to each other’s employer-provided health care; making a foreign-born spouse eligible for a green card; passing any amount of money or property on to each other tax-free; collecting unemployment upon leaving a job to join their spouse who’s been relocated; filing a lawsuit for their spouse’s wrongful death; and refusing to testify against their spouse in a criminal case. Serena Mayeri, a law professor at the
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