Wisconsin State Law Library

A recent blog post on popular idioms from the OxfordWords blog brought up the origin of the phrase in a nutshell. This idiom for summing up something concisely, they explain, has history back to the late sixteenth century where:

"Shakespeare's Hamlet uses it to mean something compact when he says, 'I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams'."

Good ol' Shakespeare!

At the law library, we're very used to seeing this idiom in the context of the the popular Nutshell series. Nutshells are intended to provide a short summary of the law and pertinent resources on particular topic areas.

Some of our most checked out Nutshells are currently:

• Criminal law in a nutshell
• Legal research in a nutshell
• Negotiable instruments and check collection in a nutshell
• Wills and trusts in a nutshell
• Professional responsibility in a nutshell
• Law of corporations in a nutshell
• Constitutional civil rights in a nutshell
• Consumer protection law in a nutshell

Some of our newest Nutshells include: 

• Remedies in a nutshell
• Debtor-creditor law in a nutshell
• Bankruptcy and related law in a nutshell
• Accounting and finance for lawyers in a nutshell
• Class actions and other multi-party litigation in a nutshell
• Modern public land law in a nutshell
• And lots more!