In leaving his own secret code in the Da Vinci Code ruling, Mr Justice Peter Smith is not the first judge to get a little creative.

Judge Deborah Servitto rapped out part of a 2003 ruling which found that the US hip-hop star Emimen did not defame a schoolboy rival in one of his songs.

In his 1999 album The Slim Shady, Eminem claimed that he "was harassed daily by this fat kid named D'Angelo Bailey." Bailey sued for libel but the judge, in full legal flow, insisted:

"The lyrics are stories no one would take as fact/ they're an exaggeration of a childish act.

"It is therefore this court's ultimate position/that Eminem is entitled to summary disposition."

Alfred Thompson, Lord Denning, who died aged 100 in 1999, delivered perhaps the most famous opening line in English legal history when he began: "It happened on April 19, 1964. It was bluebell time in Kent" in a personal injury case.

Denning, who was called "the best-known and best-loved judge in the whole of our history" by the former Lord Chief Justice Lord Bingham, began another famous judgment: "Old Peter Beswick was a coal merchant in Eccles, Lancashire."

Judge Robert Gigante of The New York Supreme Court once issued a court ruling in the style of the George Harrison classic Something as part of a case involving a doctor who once treated the Beatles legend and got him to sign a guitar on his deathbed.

Gil Lederman, a New York cancer doctor was being sued over claims that he gave too much radiation to a patient, leading to her death.

The doctor, who had previously been sued by Harrison’s family over the guitar-signing saga, asked for the second case to be heard away from New York's Staten Island because he thought he would not get a fair trial after the Harrison action.

Justice Gigante agreed but not without his own reference to the earlier case:

Something in the folks he treats /Attracts bad press like no other doctor

He's in our jurisdiction now /He gets Beatle autographs somehow

And all I have to do is move this trial /Somewhere they don't know George Harrison

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