Definition
A Roman law servitude (praedial easement) obligating a landowner not to obstruct the view from a neighboring property. The term denotes the legal right to an unobstructed prospect — that is, the protected ability to see out from one's house across adjacent land — enforced against whoever owns the burdened parcel. The corresponding obligation on the burdened owner is to refrain from erecting structures, planting trees, or otherwise interfering with the line of sight enjoyed by the dominant tenement.
Common Confusion
FENDATUR is sometimes loosely grouped with the related Roman servitude altius non tollendi (the right to prevent a neighbor from building higher), but the two are distinct. Altius non tollendi restricts vertical construction; fendatur more broadly protects the prospect or view regardless of whether the interference comes from new building, vegetation, or other obstruction. Researchers conflating these terms in civil law sources may misread the scope of the servitude at issue.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in civil law and Roman law contexts. Researchers working in common law jurisdictions will not encounter fendatur as an operative term in case law or statutes; the concept maps imperfectly onto common law easements for light and air, which are themselves narrow and disfavored in most American jurisdictions. The term surfaces primarily in treatises and digests translating or analyzing Roman and Civilian property law, and in comparative law scholarship on servitudes.
The critical trap for corpus researchers is anachronism. Sources drawing on the Digest (Dig. 8, 2, 15) use fendatur descriptively as part of a taxonomy of urban praedial servitudes. Later civil law commentators and early American legal encyclopedists sometimes borrowed this taxonomy wholesale, even when the underlying doctrine had no practical force in their own jurisdiction. Finding fendatur cited in a nineteenth-century American treatise does not mean the right was recognized locally — it more likely signals the author was working from Civilian sources as scholarly authority.
Researchers tracing the history of view or prospect rights in Louisiana, Quebec, or other mixed jurisdictions with civil law roots should give fendatur greater weight, as those systems maintained closer fidelity to Roman servitude classifications. In those contexts, the term may appear in chain-of-title disputes or servitude interpretation questions where the Roman taxonomy retained doctrinal significance.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines fendatur solely by reference to the Digest passage (Dig. 8, 2, 15), characterizing it as "a servitude not to obstruct one's prospect, i.e., not to intercept the view from one's house." This is the standard definition and is consistent with the Roman sources. Black's offers no elaboration on jurisdictional adoption or procedural enforcement, and does not address the extent to which common law courts recognized or analogized to this right.
The historical dictionaries provide no meaningful divergence on this term — it is a narrow civil law term whose definition has remained stable in legal reference works since the sources trace directly to the Digest. What historical sources collectively miss is any practical guidance on the relationship between fendatur and analogous Anglo-American doctrines, leaving corpus researchers to bridge that gap independently.
Jurisdictional Note
Fendatur as a recognized legal right is a feature of Roman and civil law systems, not common law. In jurisdictions with civil law heritage (Louisiana, Quebec, parts of Latin America), analogous servitudes protecting prospect may have statutory or customary grounding. In common law jurisdictions, there is no general easement of prospect, and courts have historically declined to recognize such rights absent express grant or long-established custom.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: SERVITUDES (Praedial); EASEMENTS OF LIGHT AND AIR