She said, smiling as she donned her Supreme Court robes

[badgerbag]

This article could be way longer!

Nancy Drew and the Secret of the Three Black Robes on Supreme Court Justices and their history of reading Nancy Drew.

It just started to get good at the end:

A charge “rightly leveled” against the early books, Ms. Rehak says, “is that they were racist — all the villains were ‘foreign’ or ‘swarthy,’ and all the African-Americans were portrayed as second class in terms of intelligence, profession, etc.” She said that “one of the things I find so interesting about Sotomayor’s citing of Nancy is that even she, as a Puerto Rican child, just looked past all of that and took away with her the essence of Nancy.”

Caroline Reitz teaches a course called Sisters in Crime in the English department at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and introduces Nancy Drew as an archetype. She says many of her students are “sort of Sotomayors, city kids often the first ones to go to college, often from different cultural backgrounds.” They tend to enjoy the unlikely Nancy Drew, she said, appreciating the lack of ambiguity in her world, since they themselves have “a much more complicated understanding of the criminal justice system today.” The students are preparing for criminal justice careers and often have relatives in the system, from inmates to police officers. For them, Professor Reitz said, “one of the things appealing about Nancy Drew is that she is not like an N.Y.P.D. officer; she doesn’t have to think about Miranda rights. At the end of the day she is her own boss. She can powder her nose and drive off.