United States | Recovery for a broken heart

In North Carolina a jilted husband can sue his wife’s lover

“Heart-balm” torts are a legal anachronism at the centre of a statehouse drama

Drone panorama of North Carolina's State Capitol against the skyline of Raleigh.
Capitol punishmentImage: Alamy
|New York

Heartache is messy; marriage is made of compromise. How potentially satisfying, then, to see all the mess and ambiguity turned into something simple and unequivocal in a lawyer’s brief. In North Carolina and a handful of other states, a jilted spouse can indeed sue for heartbreak.

This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “The heart of the matter”

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