Ordering of static fields in C# matters

via Ordering of static fields in C# matters

The ordering of static fields does matter.
But per your examples, here is the pattern I always use:

public class Person {
    private static EmptyPerson _emptyPerson;
    public static Person Empty => _emptyPerson ?? ( _emptyPerson = new EmptyPerson() );
}

The allows the Empty value to be initialized once and read-only, yet still used many times.

It also hides away the requirements of the initialization (the value pulled from a database for example) from the public getter. We could even put the value into a Lazy<Person>().

And in C# 8 we now have the compound assignment!

public class Person {
    private static EmptyPerson _emptyPerson;
    public static Person Empty => _emptyPerson ??= new EmptyPerson();
}