The Third Amendment: Soldiers and the Home

The Third Amendment forbids quartering soldiers in any house in peacetime without the owner's consent, and in wartime except as prescribed by law. To modern readers it can seem obsolete, but it addressed a real grievance. Parliament's Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774 required colonial authorities to house British troops, and the 1774 version was part of what colonists called the Intolerable Acts. The Declaration of Independence complained of 'quartering large bodies of armed troops among us'.

The Supreme Court has never decided a case based mainly on the Third Amendment. The best-known lower-court case, Engblom v. Carey in 1982, arose when New York housed National Guard troops in prison guards' residences during a 1979 strike; a federal appeals court ruled that National Guard members count as soldiers and that the guards' interest in their homes could be protected. The amendment also contributed to the idea of a constitutional zone of privacy in the home.