K.B. is a woman working for the United Kingdom National Health Service with a transsexual male partner. Her partner's male gender was not legally recognised in the United Kingdom and consequently they could not marry. Whilst the NHS pension scheme provides for the payment of a survivor's pension, this is only in respect of married partners. The European Court of Justice held that the combination of circumstances that prevented K.B.'s partner from receiving the survivor's pension amounted to sex discrimination in (...) pay contrary to Article 141 of the Treaty establishing the European Community. At first sight, this decision appears to represent a strengthening of the concept of gender equality in European Union law. Yet, the reasoning provided by the Court lacks clarity and coherence. Moreover, the reach of equality is compromised by the Court's determination to exclude any confrontation with the privileged status of heterosexual marriage. (shrink)

This article considers that reasoning over archives is a joint enterprise between archivists and researchers and that both groups are increasingly using machine agents to assist them in it. It starts by considering the processing of archivists, researchers and machine agents separately. Using the different perspectives this brings to highlight different aspects of that processing, as a process of sense-making, as scholarly research activity, as practices that realise and achieve data for the drawing of further inference, it reasserts the argument (...) that archives cannot be regarded as raw data to be reasoned over, but must be seen as the result of multiple representative and interpretive acts, of iterative realisation and activation as ‘data’ potentially involving many, many additional actors. It then goes on to consider how the involvement of machine agents fits into and potentially alters this picture by providing more detail about the basis on which they currently perform such acts. (shrink)