Large Law Firm Misery: It\u27s the Tournament, Not the Money

Will young lawyers truly be happier and more fulfiled if they can restrain their appetite for money? Professor Schiltz\u27s wonderful sermon certainly provides a stirring argument in the affirmative. In his eyes, it is greed (or materialism) that has led to the decline of the profession and makes lawyers unhappy. Lawyers\u27 lust for money is at the root of their unhappiness with the profession.\u27 This is broken down into two steps: [m]oney is at the root of virtually everything that lawyers don\u27t like about their profession: the long hours, the commercialization, etc., etc. And their obsession with money leads lawyers to engage in well-paying but unsatisfying work which is the ultimate source of their unhappiness. His theme is consistent with his earlier sermon on the errant ways of legal academics. In Legal Ethics in Decline: The Elite Law Firm, the Elite Law School, and the Moral Formation of the Novice Attorney, he argued that just as big-firm lawyers have become obsessed with maximizing income, legal academics have become obsessed with maximizing academic prestige, which is acquired by scholarship. Because of these obsessions, big-firm lawyers neglect everything else and become unhappy, and academics neglect teaching and mentoring. (No claim is made that this makes academics unhappy.) Thus both lawyers and academics have become single- minded in their pursuit of an exclusive goal and as a result have lost variety and richness in their lives. Both are urged by Professor Schiltz to pursue a more balanced life, a course which would produce not only personal satisfaction, but institutional renewal. If a sufficient number of law school graduates were to insist on maintaining balance in their lives, big firms would be very different places to- day. And if academics were to restrain their pursuit of prestige through writing, they could instead inspire such virtue in their students. As members of both of these wayward groups, we were doubly moved by his exhortation and were persuaded momentarily to find greater balance in our lives. But then the indelible skepticism that makes us lawyers, and academic lawyers at that, slowly reasserted itself

Cerebellar Nuclear Neurons Use Time and Rate Coding to Transmit Purkinje Neuron Pauses

Copyright: © 2015 Sudhakar et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedNeurons of the cerebellar nuclei convey the final output of the cerebellum to their targets in various parts of the brain. Within the cerebellum their direct upstream connections originate from inhibitory Purkinje neurons. Purkinje neurons have a complex firing pattern of regular spikes interrupted by intermittent pauses of variable length. How can the cerebellar nucleus process this complex input pattern? In this modeling study, we investigate different forms of Purkinje neuron simple spike pause synchrony and its influence on candidate coding strategies in the cerebellar nuclei. That is, we investigate how different alignments of synchronous pauses in synthetic Purkinje neuron spike trains affect either time-locking or rate-changes in the downstream nuclei. We find that Purkinje neuron synchrony is mainly represented by changes in the firing rate of cerebellar nuclei neurons. Pause beginning synchronization produced a unique effect on nuclei neuron firing, while the effect of pause ending and pause overlapping synchronization could not be distinguished from each other. Pause beginning synchronization produced better time-locking of nuclear neurons for short length pauses. We also characterize the effect of pause length and spike jitter on the nuclear neuron firing. Additionally, we find that the rate of rebound responses in nuclear neurons after a synchronous pause is controlled by the firing rate of Purkinje neurons preceding it.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio