Last night, my heartburn returned and forced me to cancel some pretty good dinner plans we had lined up. Instead, we watched a two-hour Dateline about a guy who’d been convicted of killing his wife. At the beginning of the second hour, as they were cutting to a commercial, they showed what was coming up–your quintessential southern defense attorney. I turned to the hubs and said, “Oh, yeah! I LOVE a good southern defense attorney! ‘That dog won’t hunt.’” CS just kinda looked at me weirdly.

Sure enough, the show returned and the defense attorney made much ado about how an alleged big lead was not followed up by the police and that other arguments the prosecution made did not add up. Then he said it: “That dog won’t hunt.” I burst out laughing gleefully. CS just shook his head that I would even KNOW this was going to be said, and that I’d be happy that it was.

Well, I first heard this expression in an evidence class in law school. At the time, I was all, “Whaa???” I mean, yes, a Cajun was teaching us, but did I need to know rules on how to hunt as well? Did it matter what kind of dog it was? Or what was being hunted? Oy!

It was explained to me that the phrase means that an argument, from a logic standpoint, doesn’t make sense. In the context of my evidence class, it meant that an attorney during trial could object to some evidence being submitted on some grounds, like objecting that what a witness was saying was hearsay, but that the judge would rule against the objecting attorney, say because in fact it wasn’t hearsay. That dog won’t hunt; the objection won’t stand up. Get it?

Once I mastered that one, there were always more such southern mind benders just around the corner. That same Evidence professor also schooled me on these other southern phrases:

That dog will hunt, but he won’t catch anything. (To continue my earlier example–the judge can find that it was hearsay but that an exception applies to allow hearsay testimony; thus, the objection is the right one, but it still won’t work).

Get your ducks in a row. (Meaning, be prepared).

Then there was this little gem that just grossed me out enough to stick in my head: Congress is like a bunch of cockroaches. It’s not what they eat and tote off that’s the problem, it’s what they fall into and mess up that hurts.

There are many great tales I could relay from my one semester with this colorful Professor. Here is one of my favorites. We had this guy in class who was all Horseshack every time the Prof would ask a question: His hand would fly into the air and he’d bellow, “Ou, Ou, I know, I know.” Now, most folks in law school pride themselves on NOT getting called on by a professor. Not so with this guy. Well, one day, his arm shot in the air and the Ou-Ouing began. The Prof looked at the guy kinda the way CS looked at me last night when I predicted “that dog won’t hunt” would soon be heard, and he calmly asked him, “Son, you don’t have a lot of friends here in law school, now do ya?”

Most people look back on their law school days with dread. For me, they were a time of enlightenment and personal growth. I loved this Professor and what I learned from him. Even though I am a transactional attorney and NEVER set foot in a courtroom to litigate a case, I still wax poetic about “the good ole days” and that summer I took Evidence.