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“Mending Wall” and Negligence: How a Poem can Inform the Common Law

Abstract Using selected lines from Robert Frost’s poem Mending Wall, this essay seeks to show how the poem can inform the common law of negligence. Best known for its line “good fences make good neighbors,” Mending Wall involves a narrator recounting his relationship with a neighbor, and the neighbor’s calm persistence that a good boundary wall makes good neighbors. The poem describes how and why, each spring, they walk together to fix a rock wall that is the common boundary of their property. This essay seeks to make the case for how Mending Wall also can inform the common law of negligence. After a discussion of how the author came to write the piece, the essay briefly discusses the context for, and some commentary about, Mending Wall, with the poem included in the Appendix. The essay then provides seven examples of how selected lines from Mending Wall can inform the common law of negligence. Starting with the adage that good fences make good neighbors, the examples help demonstrate when a legal fence needs to be solid and unyielding in delineating the elements of a prima facie negligence claim; when a fence provides an outer boundary for a negligence claim and when a fence is a boundary excluding a negligence claim; when a fence is not needed to define the boundary between types of remedies; how a fence implies a division of labor in what a judge decides and what a jury decides; that the outlier case can try to pull down a fence and, finally, how gaps in a fence are the grist for the mill that is the common law. The essay seeks to show that Mending Wall can be used to help inform the common law of negligence, in certain respects when viewed in a certain way. It does so, the essay suggests, episodically. It provides glimpses and clues, not comprehensive directives, and offers general targets to focus on in the study of common law negligence. Viewed in a concrete way, Mending Wall is about neighbors fixing a stone wall they share on a cold, early spring day. But it is much more than that. In these ways, as the essay suggests, Mending Wall can inform the common law of negligence.