Hey, let's get some interesting humanities papers into the mix, since thanks to COVID I had a lot of extra reading time and "best" is purely subjective:
"Erotic Modesty: (Ad)dressing Female Sexuality and Propriety in Open and Closed Drawers, USA, 1800–1930" https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1468-0424.00...
When JAmes C. Scott wrote about infrapolitcs in his 1990 work "Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts" (https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1np6zz) and described it as a sort of political resistance that never declares itself and remains beneath what the dominant group can properly perceive until the power shift actually starts to happen, he probably didn't think of a case where the undeclared politics is so literally something not meant to be seen. The theme is very much a progression of how slowly women were able to establish even what parts of their body can be sexualized or not sexualized, and culminates in a sudden burst, or power shift, in the 1910s-1930s after centuries of aggregating individual choices and entirely unseen acts. This particular revolution managed to happen almost entirely outside of organization and public view and while it's by no means over, the progress made in the last twenty years covered in the paper really show how productive the aggregation of individual acts of resistance, done without any open plans, can still bring about so much change. It also showed the limits of such movements, particularly whe the dominant group rhas an active interest in preserving that status quo.
"How Qualified Immunity Fails" https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4...
and "The Case Against Qualified Immunity"
https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4...
These two were both written by UCLA Law professor Johanna Schwartz over the course of about a year and half from 2017-2018, and really got a lot of attention this year when a lot of people for the first time asked "why does it seem impossible to actually hold abusive police to some degree of personal responsibility?" Having worked at a public defender's office and then on federal CJA cases (essentially federal defense work when there is more than one codefendant and the federal defenders would have a conflict of interest defending both), the abusive nature of policing was very much something that I saw constantly for years but it's difficult to quantify just how little potential consequence a police officer may actually face because nobody had done the shoeleather work to collect the data, and police departments tend to have opacity written into their contracts. The actual data collected by Schwartz demonstrating how the multiple layers of shielding negotiated into police contracts and just how much indemnification, which is actually illegal in many jurisdictions but universally ignored, pushes any potential liability onto taxpayers directly, creating a situation where victims' taxes are just getting looped back into the settlements they receive. There are a lot of problems in the criminal justice and really any carceral system this country runs, and most of it are poorly documented on a systemic level and difficult to quantify. It's nice to see that someone put in the work to make the picture a little clearer, as practitioners tend to be entirely focused on their clients to do research like this and this is a particularly unglamorous field of research.