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

GlyT2+ Neurons in the Lateral Cerebellar Nucleus

The deep cerebellar nuclei (DCN) are a major hub in the cerebellar circuitry but the functional classification of their neurons is incomplete. We have previously characterized three cell groups in the lateral cerebellar nucleus: large non-GABAergic neurons and two groups of smaller neurons, one of which express green fluorescence protein (GFP) in a GAD67/GFP mouse line and is therefore GABAergic. However, as a substantial number of glycinergic and glycine/GABA co-expressing neurons have been described in the DCN, this classification needed to be refined by considering glycinergic neurons. To this end we took advantage of a glycine transporter isoform 2 (GlyT2)-eGFP mouse line that allows identification of GlyT2-expressing, presumably glycinergic neurons in living cerebellar slices and compared their electrophysiological properties with previously described DCN neuron populations. We found two electrophysiologically and morphologically distinct sets of GlyT2-expressing neurons in the lateral cerebellar nucleus. One of them showed electrophysiological similarity to the previously characterized GABAergic cell group. The second GlyT2+ cell population, however, differed from all other so far described neuron types in DCN in that the cells (1) are intrinsically silent in slices and only fire action potentials upon depolarizing current injection and (2) have a projecting axon that was often seen to leave the DCN and project in the direction of the cerebellar cortex. Presence of this so far undescribed DCN neuron population in the lateral nucleus suggests a direct inhibitory pathway from the DCN to the cerebellar cortex

Microdomains for neuron-glia interaction: Parallel fiber signaling to Bergmann glial cells

Astrocytes are considered a reticulate network of cells, through which calcium signals can spread easily. In Bergmann glia, astrocytic cells of the cerebellum, we identified subcellular compartments termed 'glial microdomains'. These elements have a complex surface consisting of thin membrane sheets, contain few mitochondria and wrap around synapses. To test for neuronal interaction with these structures, we electrically stimulated parallel fibers. This stimulation increased intracellular calcium concentration ([Ca2+]i) in small compartments within Bergmann glial cell processes similar in size to glial microdomains. Thus, a Bergmann glial cell may consist of hundreds of independent compartments capable of autonomous interactions with the particular group of synapses that they ensheath