Etan Patz vanished from the streets of New York City 30 years ago this month. He is not living in an alternative universe as a 36-year-old man who grew up on Prince Street in Soho, the middle child of a school teacher and a photographer who then went to Brown or Reed and became a journalist or documentary maker married to his college sweetheart with a 7-year-old little girl and a boy, nearly 5. He doesn't live in Tribeca near his wife's former office at the Department of Homeless Services. The man Etan would have been, if a very bad person hadn't stolen his future, doesn't exist. The 6-year-old tow head did not grow into a handsome sandy-haired man with an open smile. Along with his parents, Stan and Julie Patz, who weathered an unspeakable loss, the world was robbed of an independent spirit full of curiosity and joy.

I've written before about After Etan, Lisa Cohen's riveting book on the effect of the boy's disappearance on his family and the community, which is excerpted in New York Magazine this week. Etan was detoured by something terribly evil along the two blocks from his front door to his school bus stop at West Broadway in Soho in 1979 and was never seen again. The primary suspect for Etan's murder (the first-grader's small body was never found), Jose Ramos, currently imprisoned for molesting another child, was not charged for the crime. "Stan and Julie recognized at some indefinable moment that their son was never coming home, no matter what they said, so they stopped saying anything, turning away from the spotlight," Lisa writes. But, as long-serving Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau prepares to retire, the victim's father has renewed demands for Ramos' indictment. With the 30th anniversary of his kidnapping approaching, it's worth reminding ourselves how the child who never grew up changed society's perception of danger to unsupervised children, adding a vigilance and parental fear that was, and sadly remains, all too necessary.

Tags: After Etan, Etan Patz, Lisa Cohen, missing children, Robert Morgenthau

The Irish government has released a report detailing the vicious beatings, rape, and emotional abuse inflicted on tens of thousands children entrusted to the care of Catholic orphanages for 60 years, until the 1990s. The Times pulls out this description: “Punching, flogging, assault and bodily attacks ... burning, scalding, stabbing, severe beatings with or without clothes, being made to kneel and stand in fixed positions for lengthy periods ... beaten while hanging from hooks on the wall, being set upon by dogs ..." Not to mention relentless sexual assault. In response to the report, the Vatican is silent, and the government names none of the abusers—a result of Church pressure and lawsuits. An apology and some cash is what is being offered to the victims. But how is it the perpetrators get to decide they will not be prosecuted? And how can this chapter be closed until every rapist and sadist still alive is tracked down and tried?

Tags: Abuse, Catholic Church, Irish orphans

Yesterday morning I nearly spit out my Corn Flakes as I read the latest New York Times “Skin Deep” feature, “Treating Cellulite, It’s Still There.” And not because, “the ass pictured is almost cellulite-free, while the story is about the terrible problem of cellulite,” as Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan put it.

Ladies, it shouldn’t be news that anti-cellulite treatments don’t work. Or that cellulite is incurable. Also what shouldn’t be news—but, maddeningly, is—is that most anti-cellulite products and anti-aging creams are illegal and flourishing under the unconscionably laissez-faire FDA. It’s ironic that the “Skin Deep” column takes its title from the great muckraking book of 1934 by Mary Catherine Phillips—one of several books that led to the creation of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, which is supposed to protect consumers from bogus cosmetics and drugs.

The act states in no uncertain terms that cosmetics cannot claim to “affect the structure or any function of the body of man.” In other words, cosmetics companies must stick to matters of appearance, not therapy. Cosmetic companies cannot market products that claim to change any aspect of your skin or your skin’s structure or function: Collagen-plumping serums? Illegal. Free radical-preserving goop? Illegal. Cellulite-busting unguents? Illegal.

If a product does makes such a claim it is, by definition, a drug, and needs to go through rigorous testing at the Office of Drug Evaluation and Research to prove not only that it is safe but that it also works. So if a cellulite reduction cream claims to melt cellulite or tighten skin then legally, the claim needs to be tested and cleared by the FDA. This is a basic consumer protection provided by the Act. We should stop tolerating less!

In the 1960s and then again in the 1980s journalists frequently reported on misbranded anti-wrinkle and anti-cellulite products, and the FDA challenged these companies in court. On April 10, 1988, when the FDA was in the midst of its last crackdown, The New York Times published the following in an op-ed: “All the FDA is asking is that fantasy and reality be kept separate. The cosmetic companies need only retreat back to fantasy”—meaning abandon the therapeutic claims for traditional "this will make you gorgeous" puffery—“and their customers will live as happily as before.”

As baby boomers advance into old age we’ve all had to adapt to the anti-aging-centric marketplace and have come to accept and even embrace the proliferation of cosmetics that are actually misbranded drugs. I'm sure the democratization of plastic surgery has a lot to do with this: why opt for a regular bottle of Oil of Olay body cream when you can benefit from the anti-cellulite version? But is it too much to ask the New York Times and other journalists to separate fantasy from reality? And, most crucially, if the FDA did its job we would have known that cellulite was incurable because the $47 million anti-cellulite product market wouldn’t exist and fool us into thinking—or misunderstanding, or blundering, or wondering, or hoping—otherwise.

Tags: anti-aging, beauty, cellulite, cosmetics, F.D.A., skin care, wrinkles

“Poor kid” is right, Emily. The Heenes are not only spectacularly bad parents, but they might soon become inmates in Colorado state prison. In the span of one short weekend, the Balloon Boy drama has turned out to be just that—an elaborate one-act theatrical work put on by the Heene Family Players, staged on television stations and computer screens across the country. We now know that the Heenes' ordeal was just one more attention-grabbing stunt in what appears to be an agonizingly protracted audition for a TLC-style reality television show—the last act in a series of questionable parenting moves.

In response, the state has decided to press felony criminal charges. According to authorities, “among the charges being considered are three felonies: conspiracy between the husband and the wife to commit a crime, contributing to the delinquency of a minor and an attempt to influence a public servant, the last of which carries a prison term of six years.”

Sure, it’s not terribly responsible to lie to the police and whip hundreds of rescue workers into a frenzy, not to mention jerk with the emotions of untold numbers of viewers at home. But do the Heenes really deserve to be put behind bars?

According to the Colorado Criminal Code, a Class Four felony such as this one requires a sentence of two to six years imprisonment. The crucial elements of the most serious offense are “(1) an attempt to influence a public servant (2) by means of deceit ... (3) with the intent to alter or affect the public servant's decision,” where “deceit” is defined as in Webster’s Dictionary as “any trick, collusion, contrivance, false representation, or underhand practice used to defraud another.”

Under this statute, the Heenes’ statements and actions seem to qualify as unlawful deceit. Their hoax conned Colorado police officers, firemen, and naval helicopter pilots, to name a few.

But if this was all an intricate piece of performance art, then couldn’t the Heenes' stunt qualify as constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment’s Freedom of Speech Clause?

Yes and no.

In Schad v. Borough of Mount Ephraim, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment protects “motion pictures, programs broadcast by radio and television, and live entertainment, such as musical and dramatic works.” So if the Heenes admit they were merely acting, can these master thespians avoid the slammer? Probably not. The First Amendment protects against censorship, not criminal prosecution. They have the right to perform their twisted audition, but the performance may still run afoul of criminal statutes. You may, for instance, perjure yourself before a jury without being silenced but would still be liable for prosecution. The Heenes’ motivation—whether artistic expression, malice, delusions of grandeur, or perhaps all three—is irrelevant so long as the behavior is criminally proscribed. At this point, their best chance of avoiding jail time is to seek leniency for being first-time offenders.

Instead of a family-friendly TLC reality show, it looks like Richard and Mayumi are headed for a guest appearance on MSNBC’s Lockup. I sure hope they’re not “pussified.”

Tags: balloon boy, balloon hoax, crime, free speech, Heene family, law, parenting, prison

Top law firms report having few or no women on their list of the top 10 "rainmakers." Fifteen years out of law school and a veteran of big-firm life, I asked former classmates and colleagues why women don't bring in the bucks. Should I be surprised that the answers turned out to reflect their own gender divide?

Men, while offering a nod to the idea that perhaps women led more balanced lives (proper rainmaking behavior is a 24/7 job: If you've seen Ari Gold on Entourage, you've seen somebody making it rain), seemed inclined to put the new statistic (from a study the National Association of Women Lawyers and reported on Law.com) in the category of "change that hasn't filtered up yet." Top rainmaking men, they proposed, just haven't died out. Most "new business" isn't really new, of course—law firms collect new deals from the same old banks and clients, and those relationships, many established decades ago, still persist.

The women in my totally unscientific survey (just as professionally accomplished as the men) saw it differently. They noted the macho culture that still walks the walk at many top firms—and at the offices of their clients. The men at the top are still more comfortable hanging out with men, along with which goes the chest-thumping, the desire to hold conversations that aren't exactly PC. One recalled men who refused to socialize with women colleagues out of fear of what their wives would say—which doesn't exactly encourage the kind of comfortable interaction that leads people to want to continue working together. All of them tagged the ruthless competition. Rainmaking is a zero-sum game; any edge has to be played to the hilt, and if you can knock a woman out of the game by taking a client to Hooters, so be it. (Let it be said that I know women who've done that to other women, too.)

I have to admit that my first take on this question was to write it off, as did the men I asked, as a leftover, something likely to change sooner than later. Hearing from my colleagues still in the fray reminded that it's probably not quite so innocuous. It also reminded me that we probably won't hear much more about this statistic—because not one of the women I talked to would even breathe on this topic until I promised not to name names. Maybe, Emily, this all has something to do with why we don't hear the women of the White House on the subject of Obama's all-male basketball games. Unfortunately, nobody ever got to the top by trying to level the playing field.

Photograph of businesspeople by Jupiterimages/Getty Images.

Tags: law, women in the workplace

Claire, I'd love to join you in indicting those limp pastries—and the ineffectual bureaucratic dithering they inspire—for the shameful silence surrounding sexual assaults on campus. But there is a bigger factor at play than the fractured reporting system. While loopholes in the current framework certainly assist universities in saving face and steering clear of the U.S. News & World Report's “Best Colleges for Vicious Sexual Predators” list, these permissive policies are primarily a response to the evolution of rape law over the last several decades.

Beginning in the late 1960s, the law of sexual assault underwent dramatic reform, shifting focus from female purity to personal autonomy. Conviction for rape now relies on the victim’s nonconsent rather than a physical display of “utmost resistance,” which had previously set the burden of proof at an unattainably high level and required victims to risk their lives during an attack. These victim-friendly reforms increased the number of successful prosecutions, which, in turn, provided potential complainants with a greater incentive to file police reports.

As bastions of progressive thought, universities should have been perfectly poised to absorb these modern regulations and encourage greater reporting of suspected sexual assaults. But the expansion of victims’ rights and remedies coincided with a corresponding curtailment of offenders’ civil rights. These opposing trends have strained universities’ dual allegiance to victim and assailant, both of whom are students.

Schools are charged not merely with providing a safe learning environment but with molding students’ characters and preparing them to be productive members of society. In the context of campus sexual assaults, rendering justice to one student comes at the expense of branding the other a sex offender, depriving him of employability and any hope of social inclusion. Although the average prison sentence of rape defendants has remained relatively stable over the years, the average time served has increased significantly. And even if a student manages to escape with a light sentence, the stigma persists. With the federal passage of Megan’s Law in 1995 and the enactment of other state-specific restrictions, including a recent New York law banishing sex offenders from Facebook and MySpace, conviction effectively relegates the student to the status of burger-flipping pariah.

While this may be a fitting penalty in clear-cut cases of violent crime, the hazy, bacchanalian atmosphere of a college party complicates the moral calculus. Administrators are loath to destroy a student’s entire future for an isolated incident of poor judgment and impulse control. This is not some relic of the old boys-will-be-boys attitude; rather, school officials recognize the unique role of college as a launching pad for the real world, as a place where students’ inexperience and newfound independence come together to create four years of ad hoc, trial-and-error learning. By weighing the costs and benefits to both the victim and offender of a formal report, universities are simply engaging in the kind of prosecutorial discretion that government attorneys practice every day.

University administrators may point fingers at the flawed reporting system, but the real problem lies with the officials themselves, who feel obligated to look out for the best interests of all their students, victim and perpetrator alike.

Tags: campus sexual assault, college, law, Rape, sex offenders

While the question of whether kids today are sexting up a storm or reaching new heights of prudery may never be satisfactorily answered, the window for such wireless waggery might be closing. On Monday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear the case of a police sergeant who sued his department for reading the lewd text messages he sent on a company pager. As Emily Bazelon reported in Slate on Wednesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the sexting cop and held that users have “a reasonable expectation of privacy in their text messages” regardless of whether an employer supplies the equipment or pays for the service.

Unfortunately, the lower court's attempts to forge progressive digital policy may turn out to be the ambitious opening sallies in a battle that cannot be won. If there is one common thread among the current justices of the Supreme Court, it is a strong bias in favor of government plaintiffs. Given the Court’s equally powerful penchant for minimalism, electronic privacy advocates are hoping for a narrow ruling that applies exclusively to public employers. Even so, with the arrival of America's favorite wise Latina to the bench, right-leaning privacy foes will likely enjoy a wider margin of victory than the usual Roberts Court 5-4 split. While Sotomayor's views on most issues fall squarely within the traditional bounds of liberal jurisprudence, one of her past decisions reveals a bias toward snooping bosses in workplace search-and-seizure disputes.

In a 2001 opinion, then-Second Circuit Judge Sotomayor rejected a Fourth Amendment challenge brought against an employer for ransacking a worker's computer. She concluded that the search was reasonable due to the employer’s "need to investigate allegations of misconduct as balanced against the modest intrusion caused by the searches.” By framing the issue as a balancing of interests and privileging the employer’s ability to discipline its workers above the employee’s constitutional protection against warrantless searches, Sotomayor dealt a crushing blow to digital privacy rights. The parallels with the cop case are obvious, and the news this week does not bode well for the longevity of the Ninth Circuit’s ruling.

So, kids, to those 94 percent or 80 percent of you not bombarding your petite paramours with salty puns and hook-up requests, I exhort you to start exercising your civil liberties and sext like there's no tomorrow—because there might not be one. If your algebra teacher catches you tapping away during class, tell him it’s a civics project.

Tags: cyberlaw, law, privacy, sexting, Supreme Court, teens

As Hanna wrote in October, Oklahoma anti-choicers discovered a clever new way to rob women of their reproductive rights. Under the guise of policy research, the Oklahoma House of Representatives passed a bill requiring women seeking an abortion to complete a 37-question autobiographical survey, the results of which would be posted on a publicly accessible Web site. Critics of the new measure argue that the first eight questions could easily identify women living in the state’s more sparsely populated rural regions and discourage them from undergoing the procedure out of fear of public shame, harassment, or retaliatory violence.

This time the abortion foes’ savvy subterfuge backfired. In order to prevent the law from taking effect, the Center for Reproductive Justice filed a temporary restraining order and launched a lawsuit alleging that the bill’s wide-ranging provisions violate the state’s “single-subject rule,” which prohibits prospective laws from addressing more than one issue. Although all of the clauses of House Bill 1595 pertain broadly to the subject of abortion, the Center argues that the creation of a brand new job for the Department of Health and the seemingly random inclusion of a ban on gender selection render the initiative invalid. An Oklahoma district judge recently decided to extend the restraining order until Feb. 19, when the court will rule on the merits of the case.

Despite the preliminary success of this dilatory tactic, some feminists lament that the Center’s complaint attacks the legislation on procedural, rather than substantive, grounds, and does not address the fundamental affront to women’s health and privacy. Even if a judge tosses out the new law, there is nothing stopping lawmakers from drafting a similar, more narrowly focused bill. Defeating the law on substantive grounds should not have been difficult. As some have pointed out, the purported goal of gathering information is bogus at best, as the data would be inappropriate for academic research. Moreover, the identifying details in women’s responses likely qualify as “protected health information” under HIPAA and cannot be made available to the public. Perhaps most importantly, publishing this kind of data tacitly incites vigilantism by Christian fundamentalists. In Operation Rescue country, women identified as abortion recipients don’t simply risk losing health coverage—they risk losing their lives and livelihoods.

Tags: abortion, law, oklahoma, Oklahoma abortion law, reproductive rights

In theory, the Supreme Court’s profoundly plutocratic ruling in Citizens United v. FEC upends a century of campaign finance reform and overturns dozens of state laws. But in practice, since corporations are loath to alienate customers and shareholders with political attack ads, the decision may have scant effect on election outcomes.

So what’s the big deal then? For many of us on the left, what is most troubling about Citizens United—apart, of course, from its anti-democratic spirit and dubious legal justification—is that it reveals just how aggressively the Republican justices are willing to tear into decades-old precedent to pursue their own reactionary agenda, once they’ve got that crucial fifth vote. Reproductive rights advocates have begun sounding the alarm, arguing that this bold move does not bode well for Roe v. Wade. Like campaign finance reform, abortion has been a longtime bête noire of conservatives. With Kennedy firmly in their pack, some analysts say, Roberts and company will finally be free to deal the fatal blow to abortion rights by eviscerating Roe and its progeny.

I’m not so sure. With a few notorious exceptions, the Roberts Court has tread lightly on high-profile cases, narrowly interpreting the law to avoid important constitutional questions. While some ascribe this trend to Roberts’ feigned “umpire”-style minimalism, it may well be that Roberts et al. simply haven’t had enough votes to advance their ultraconservative jurisprudence. In Citizens United, lawyers shrewdly spun the issue as one of censorship, a clever overture to “swing” Justice Kennedy and his known soft spot for free speech. Thus far, however, Kennedy has given court watchers no indication that he is likely to supply abortion foes with that crucial fifth vote. He is, after all, one of the authors of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that kept the core of Roe intact.

Tags: abortion, campaign finance reform, citizens united v. fec, law, roe v. wade, Supreme Court

I agree, Dahlia. Despite the media's attempt to paint Alito as some kind of fist-pumping judicial tea bagger, his mildly indecorous headshake was hardly the “partisan sideshow” some liberal bloggers have made it out to be. The problem is not that the court has morphed into some kind of political monster over the last decade, it's that, in the age of 24-hour news and juicy tell-all memoirs from government officials, the patina of impartiality has begun to wear off. No wonder the Supremes don't want cameras in the courtroom.

More than anything else, this incident reflects the personal rancor that persists between Obama and the newest conservative justices. Alito and Roberts, both Bush nominees, faced substantial opposition from Senate Democrats during their confirmation hearings. Toeing the party line, then-Senator Obama voted against Roberts' promotion to the Supreme Court and joined the effort to filibuster against Alito's confirmation. For the junior justice, these wounds are still fresh. It was reported last year that Alito boycotted a casual meet-and-greet with the new president and crosses to the far side of the street whenever he walks on Capitol Hill.

So what's to be done about this? If Obama can spare a sudsy summer afternoon for a dialogue on race, surely he can demonstrate true due deference to his colleagues in the third branch and make an earnest bid at détente. I propose that Obama sit down with the conservative justices over a few glasses of wine, or, better yet, engage them in a rousing game of hoops on the highest court in the land. And let them win this time.

Tags: citizens united, Justice Alito, law, Obama, Supreme Court