Definition
COMMUNITY carries three distinct legal meanings, and the applicable sense depends almost entirely on context.
1. A society or locality. In its broadest legal sense, a community is a group of people living in the same place, subject to the same laws and regulations, and sharing common rights and privileges. This is the meaning most often encountered in constitutional law, land use, public law, and criminal sentencing contexts — as in "the community's interest" or "community standards."
2. A civil-law marital estate. In states following the civil-law tradition, community refers to the legal relationship created between spouses at marriage by which property acquired during the marriage through the efforts of either spouse becomes jointly owned. This is the foundation of community property law. The "community" in this sense is the partnership of the marital union, and it has a distinct juridical character — the community owns property as an entity, not merely as co-tenants.
3. A corporation or body politic (Roman and civil law). In Roman law and the civil law tradition, a community could refer to a corporation or organized collective body with legal standing — closer to what modern law calls a juridical person or municipal corporation.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A group sharing common characteristics such as language, law, religion, or tradition; a residential or religious collective; a group of organisms inhabiting the same region; a virtual group interacting by electronic means; the condition of having something in common.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Common possession or enjoyment; participation; a body of people having common rights, privileges, or interests, or living in the same place under the same laws and regulations.
The gap is narrower here than with many legal terms — ordinary and legal usage largely overlap in meaning 1. The meaningful divergence is in meaning 2: when a lawyer in a community property state says "the community owns this asset," they are invoking a technical legal estate with specific rules about management, liability, and division at death or divorce. A layperson reading the same sentence might understand only that a group of people holds something in common, entirely missing the structured property regime underneath.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Community property: The marital estate created in community property jurisdictions. Property acquired during marriage by the labor of either spouse belongs equally to both. Contrasted with separate property.
Community standards: The benchmark used in obscenity law and certain other public-interest inquiries, referring to the prevailing attitudes or norms of the relevant geographic community.
Community service: A sentencing alternative requiring a convicted person to perform unpaid work for a public or nonprofit organization in lieu of or in addition to incarceration or fines.
Community of goods: The civil-law concept of common ownership or enjoyment between parties — in early usage, between spouses; more broadly, common possession in any partnership-like arrangement.
Why It Matters in Research
The multi-valence of this term creates real traps in corpus research. Searching for "community" in nineteenth-century American legal sources will surface results from at least three distinct legal contexts — property law, local government law, and criminal law — without any obvious signal as to which is operative. Researchers working on marital property history must be especially alert: in early American sources, "community" without modification almost always signals the civil-law marital estate, not a neighborhood or group. This usage is concentrated in Louisiana, Texas, California, and other jurisdictions with Spanish or French legal heritage.
The evolution of community property law in the United States is also temporally uneven. The system "first found footing in this country" in the Spanish and French colonial territories and was absorbed into American law only as those territories became states. Nineteenth-century treatise writers often treat community property as an exotic civil-law curiosity; twentieth-century sources treat it as a parallel property system of equal stature to the common-law separate property regime.
In criminal and constitutional law, "community" appears heavily after the mid-twentieth century — in sentencing reform literature, community supervision statutes, and community standards doctrine in First Amendment cases. Researchers who assume the term carries its property-law meaning when reading post-1960s criminal procedure materials will be misled.
There is also a federalism dimension. Federal tax treatment of community property is its own field (see Encyclopedia cross-references), and the interaction between state community property rules and federal tax law has produced a significant and sometimes counterintuitive body of doctrine.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries converge on two core definitions but treat them with unequal depth. Black's (both editions) opens with the locality/society meaning and follows with the civil-law corporation sense, suggesting that was the conventional ordering for American legal audiences. The 2nd edition adds case citations anchoring the society definition in American case law, confirming it was the more litigated meaning domestically.
Burrill's, drawing on French sources and Kent's Commentaries, devotes its entry almost entirely to the marital partnership meaning — communauté — and cites Kent's extended treatment of the subject. This reflects Burrill's orientation toward the civil and common law synthesis that characterized mid-nineteenth-century American jurisprudence. The definition as "a species of partnership which a man and woman contract where they are lawfully married" is precise and technically useful, though modern community property law has moved beyond the simple partnership analogy.
Bouvier's entry, though partially captured in the source excerpt, signals that the "community system of matrimonial gains" was understood in nineteenth-century American law as a distinct, civil-law-origin regime contrasted with the common-law default. The framing around "community property" as a label had already crystallized by the time Bouvier wrote.
What the historical dictionaries largely miss is the twentieth-century expansion of "community" as a legal and policy term — community service, community supervision, community standards, community development law — none of which appear in these sources. Researchers should not expect historical dictionary entries to illuminate these modern uses.
Jurisdictional Note
Community property law applies in nine states: Arizona, California, Idaho, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin (the last by adoption of the Uniform Marital Property Act). Alaska allows opt-in community property by agreement. In all other states, the common-law separate property system governs. This divide is fundamental to any research touching marital property, estate planning, or federal tax treatment of spousal assets.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Community Service and Alternative Sentencing — Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia
Community Property Federal Tax — Law Mind Tax Encyclopedia
Spousal Privileges — Testimonial Privilege and Marital Communications — Law Mind Civil Procedure & Evidence Encyclopedia