Third Amendment

The Third Amendment is the shortest and least-litigated provision in the Bill of Rights: a single sentence forbidding the government from housing soldiers in private homes without the owner's consent in peacetime, and only as the law directs in war. To modern readers it can look like a historical curiosity. To the generation that ratified it in 1791, it addressed a live and bitter grievance.

The colonists had reason to fear soldiers in their parlors. After the French and Indian War, Parliament passed the Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774, requiring colonial governments to house and supply British troops — a demand the Declaration of Independence later listed among its charges against King George III, condemning the Crown for quartering large bodies of armed troops among the people. The amendment turned that resentment into a constitutional guarantee that a standing army could never again be billeted on the citizenry at will.

In practice the amendment has almost never reached the courts. The Supreme Court has never decided a case squarely on its terms. Its one notable appearance came in Engblom v. Carey (1982), when a federal appeals court held that National Guardsmen housed in the dormitories of striking prison guards could implicate Third Amendment protections — a rare ruling that also suggested the amendment might apply to the states. Scholars sometimes cite it as an early textual root of the constitutional right to privacy later drawn from several amendments together.