Oh, fun!
The judge in the famous lawsuit involving Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code encoded a secret message in his ruling (.pdf link). The judge apparently really got interested in the conspiratorial, hidden-secrets aspect of the case. The fact that he himself is interested in military and naval history may have been a further inspiration. (Hints here.)
Have fun. Or if you'd rather, just read the answer. Note that the ABC News aritcle linked above includes some speculations about the answer which are not necessarily correct.
I wonder if this judgment will become one of those that future law students and law librarians will be sent to look up in the hopes that its eccentricity will amuse them. (For example, this case, or the rhyming judgement against a bad driver who ran his Chevy into a tree that I had to look up in the one class I took on law librarianship. Sadly, I can't find it now. Obviously the class didn't take.)
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Fiend @ 10:47PM | 2006-04-28| permalink
Speaking of eccentric jurists, following English common law tradition, no Canadian law student gets through first year without encountering the eloquent Lord Denning. ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/290996.stm )Not quite up to rhyming couplet standards, but here's a sampling.
http://www.legalhumour.com/denning.asp
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Felix @ 6:50PM | 2006-04-29| permalink
He seems to have been a smart guy who could turn an eloquent phrase, but I'm not sure that having judges ignore the written laws as a general principle is a good idea.
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Felix @ 6:59PM | 2006-04-29| permalink
I did enjoy this juristical comment from the second link you posted:
"No customer in a thousand ever read the conditions . If he had stopped to do so, he would have missed the train or the boat.
None of those cases has any application to a ticket which is issued by an automatic machine. The customer pays his money and gets a ticket. He cannot refuse it. He cannot get his money back. He may protest to the machine, even swear at it; but it will remain unmoved."
---Thornton v Shoe Lane Parking Ltd <1971> 1 All ER 686
It sounds like a precursor to the cases involving "shrink-wrap licences" that have given IP lawyers so much gainful employment in recent years.
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