by Eric Wood
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The Third Amendment is the shortest and least litigated of the ten - no reported Supreme Court case has ever decided a claim under it directly. That rarity is itself the point: the grievance it answers was resolved so completely that the right built to prevent it has almost never needed defending in court.
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Third Amendment, U.S. Constitution
Why this was worth a constitutional amendment
Before the Revolution, the Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774 required American colonists to house and supply British troops, sometimes directly in private homes. The practice became one of the specific grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, which accused the king of “quartering large bodies of armed troops among us.” By the time the Bill of Rights was drafted, memory of soldiers occupying private homes without an owner’s consent was recent and vivid enough that protecting against it seemed as necessary as protecting speech or religion.
The amendment draws a real distinction between peacetime and wartime: quartering is barred outright in peacetime, but permitted in wartime if done “in a manner to be prescribed by law” - meaning Congress, not the military directly, would have to authorize it through ordinary legislation.
Worth knowing
The one significant federal court case to address the amendment at all, Engblom v. Carey (1982), involved National Guard troops housed in employee housing during a New York prison guards’ strike. The Second Circuit held that the amendment’s protections extend to tenants, not just homeowners, and that National Guard troops count as “soldiers” for the amendment’s purposes - but even this case settled before reaching a final ruling on the merits.
Why it still matters
Courts have occasionally pointed to the Third Amendment as evidence that the Constitution protects a broader right to privacy in the home, even though the amendment itself is narrowly about soldiers. Justice William O. Douglas’s majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the case establishing a constitutional right to privacy, cited the Third Amendment’s protection against forced quartering as one of several amendments whose “penumbras” together imply a broader zone of personal privacy the government can’t invade. In that sense, a nearly-never-litigated amendment still shaped one of the most consequential privacy rulings in American law.
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