The Law Commission has recommended, as part of a major overhaul to inheritance law, that unmarried couples should have equal inheritance rights. The proposal suggests that unmarried couples who live together for five years or more should be able to inherit from each other without writing a will. This provision would also apply to couples who had lived together for two years or more and who had a child, providing that the child lived with the couple at the time one parent died. An exception to the proposed law would be where one partner had been previously married to another partner and had not divorced them. In this situation, the surviving co-habitant would have no right to the deceased’s estate. If passed, this British law is thought to affect roughly 7 million families who cohabit but have never married.