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Judge slips a code into verdict

Sam Jones

London: A quick glance around Britain's train carriages, libraries and coffee shops is sufficient to confirm that few people are immune to the enigmatic charms of The Da Vinci Code. And neither, it seems, is the High Court judge who recently ruled that Dan Brown's best-selling thriller had not breached the copyright of an earlier book on the same subject.

After remaining undetected for three weeks — admittedly not much to rival the two millennia of the cover-up at the heart of Mr. Brown's book — it has emerged that Mr Justice Peter Smith could not resist slipping a code of his own into his judgment on the case.

For the past three weeks, lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic have been puzzling over a series of strange italicisations in Mr Justice Smith's 71-page judgment, which was handed down on April 7. The odd letters appeared to crop up randomly throughout the text and most people assumed they were typographical errors. But on closer examination, a pattern has emerged.

The first clue — the word claimants with the "s" in italics — is found in paragraph one of the document. In the next paragraph, the "m" in claimant is italicised. Read together, the italicised letters in the first seven paragraphs spell out the self-referential legend ``Smithy code''.

Dan Tench, a media lawyer with the London firm Olswang, was among the first to realise something was afoot. After tipping off a newspaper, he received an email from Mr Justice Smith, confirming his suspicions.

``When the judgment came out, it caught my eye that there were these odd italic letters which I thought were just a humorous mistake,'' said Mr Tench.

``But then it became clear that something was going on. After the story came out, I got an email from the judge saying that it wasn't a mistake but that he had put a code in his judgment.''

Mr Justice Smith was on Wednesday remaining as tight-lipped as the Mona Lisa. ``I can't discuss the judgment,'' he said. ``But I don't see why a judgment should not be a matter of fun.''

He was scarcely more forthcoming on whether or not he expected the code to be broken. ``I don't know,'' he said. ``It's not a difficult thing to do.''

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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