ABSTRACT
In 1984, Joseph Sax identified community as the missing blank in American law. ‘The notion of community entitlement is virtually empty space in the legal constellation … there isn’t even an accepted or commonplace legal definition of community’ (Sax 1984b, p.1). Twenty-six years later, despite intermittent filling of that space, Sax sees little change, noting that ‘almost every conception of land in modern times has ignored community values’ (Sax 2011, p.13). Sax’s observations highlight the dilemma of reconciling community and property in land, a challenge with existential and normative implications. 1 This chapter examines the marginalized links between property and community, a subject matter ‘left unexplored’ within property scholarship (Alexander and Penalver 2010, p.xxxiii), and asks whether property diversity may present some answers to that dilemma. For, as Sax also says ‘[d]iversity is a good thing, in human settlements as well as nature. Or, to put it another way, eclecticism is not a bad thing’ (Sax 1984a, p.509).
