Definition
Fare has two core legal meanings that appear consistently across historical sources:
1. The price of passage. The sum charged by a carrier — whether by land or water — for transporting a passenger from one place to another. This is the primary modern legal meaning. Fare is the contractual consideration that creates the carrier-passenger relationship and, with it, the carrier's corresponding duty of care. The amount may be fixed by contract, tariff, regulatory schedule, or statute.
2. The passage or voyage itself. In older usage, fare referred to the journey undertaken, not merely the price paid for it. This sense is now largely obsolete in legal contexts but appears in historical sources and early case law.
A third, narrower meaning survives in utility law: in the context of water companies, fare has been used to describe the rate or compensation a utility may charge for furnishing a supply of water — essentially synonymous with toll or rate in that context.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A money paid for a transport ticket; a paying passenger (especially in a taxi); food and drink; supplies for consumption or pleasure.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To go; to pass; to journey; to travel. Also used as a verb meaning to be in any state or pass through any experience — as in "he fared well."
Editorial note: Three of fare's common meanings are legally significant but in different ways. The transport-payment sense aligns directly with the primary legal definition. The "paying passenger" sense (a fare as a person, not a price) is colloquially widespread but legally imprecise — in law, the passenger is the party, and the fare is what they pay. The "food and drink" sense has no recognized legal meaning and should not mislead researchers encountering the word in older general-purpose texts.
Common Confusion
Fare vs. Toll: The terms are functionally similar — both describe charges for use of a service or infrastructure — but they are not interchangeable. Toll most often attaches to the use of a road, bridge, or ferry crossing considered as infrastructure; fare most often attaches to the carriage of a person as a passenger. A bridge may charge a toll; a stagecoach charges a fare. Bouvier notes the distinction implicitly by cross-referencing fare to rates and ticket rather than to toll in its transportation sense. In utility law, the line blurs further, and some sources use fare, toll, and rate nearly interchangeably.
Fare vs. Freight: Fare is the charge for carrying a passenger. Freight is the charge for carrying goods. The two are governed by overlapping but distinct bodies of carrier law. Conflating them in historical source research produces unreliable results.
Why It Matters in Research
The dual meaning of fare — voyage versus price — is a trap in pre-20th century sources. A court or commentator writing that a passenger "completed the fare" may be referring to the journey, not the payment. Context, and the date of the source, determine which meaning applies. By the late 19th century, the price-of-passage sense had become dominant in American case law, but the voyage sense persisted in English sources longer.
The carrier-passenger relationship hinges on fare in ways that matter doctrinally. Whether a fare was paid, tendered, refused, or in dispute affects questions of the carrier's duty of care, whether a person qualifies as a passenger (rather than a trespasser or licensee), and what remedies attach to wrongful ejection or denial of passage. Researchers working on 19th-century railroad and steamboat litigation should be alert to fare as a threshold legal fact, not merely a pricing detail.
The utility-law usage of fare (water companies, and by extension other rate-regulated entities) opens into an entirely different body of law — public utilities, rate-setting authority, and regulatory takings — that has nothing to do with passenger transportation. Bouvier's citation to a North Carolina case involving a water company is the clearest signal in the historical sources that this usage exists and is distinct.
Anderson's entry is a pure cross-reference with no independent definition, which is itself instructive: it tells researchers that fare as a standalone term was considered subsidiary to its application contexts — bridge, carrier, ferry, passenger, railroad, toll. That navigational structure reflects how the historical sources organized carrier law more broadly.
Jurisdictional variation in how fares are regulated (by statute, tariff, or common law) is substantial but falls outside the definitional question. Researchers pursuing regulated-fare disputes should pivot quickly to the applicable regulatory framework for the jurisdiction and period at issue.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical sources are unusually consistent on the core definition. Black's (both editions) and Bouvier agree that fare means the money paid for passage and that the voyage-sense is the older meaning. Bouvier's phrasing — "the latter is the modern signification" — confirms that even by the time of his writing, the price-of-passage meaning had displaced the journey meaning as the operative legal concept.
Bouvier adds the most substantive information by extending the term to utility-rate law, citing a North Carolina case and cross-referencing rates. Black's does not flag this extension, which is a meaningful gap for researchers working in utility or municipal law rather than transportation law.
Anderson's cross-reference-only approach, while unhelpful in isolation, signals the term's connective function: fare is a point of entry into a web of carrier-law concepts rather than a self-contained doctrine.
None of the historical sources addresses fare in the context of modern regulated mass transit — subways, buses, and public transportation authorities — where the term is ubiquitous but where the regulatory and constitutional dimensions have evolved significantly beyond the 19th-century common-carrier framework captured in these sources.