What is the Third Amendment?

The Third Amendment reads in full: '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.' It was ratified on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that together form the Bill of Rights. The Amendment was placed third in the sequence that James Madison proposed to Congress in 1789, between the freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly, and petition (First Amendment) and the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures (Fourth Amendment). Like most of the Bill of Rights, the Third Amendment emerged from specific colonial grievances that the Founders were determined to prevent from recurring under the new constitutional government. The Amendment contains two clauses: an absolute peacetime prohibition on quartering soldiers in private homes without the owner's consent, and a conditional wartime permission on quartering 'in a manner to be prescribed by law' -- Congress may authorize wartime quartering, but only within a statutory framework, not by executive discretion alone.

The Third Amendment's origins lie in the extended conflict between American colonists and the British Parliament over the housing of British troops. Parliament enacted the Quartering Act of 1765, which required colonial governments to provide barracks or, if barracks were insufficient, alternative housing in inns, livery stables, ale houses, or uninhabited houses for British soldiers stationed in the colonies. The act also required colonial governments to supply the troops with food, fuel, candles, cooking utensils, and other necessaries. The New York colonial assembly's refusal to comply with the 1765 Act led Parliament to suspend the assembly in 1767 -- the first suspension of a colonial legislature by Parliament. Parliament enacted a revised Quartering Act in 1774 as one of the five Coercive Acts (called the 'Intolerable Acts' by colonists), this version authorizing the quartering of troops in occupied private dwellings. The Declaration of Independence enumerated 'quartering large bodies of armed troops among us' as one of the specific abuses by King George III that justified independence. The experience left a lasting imprint on the Founding generation: James Madison's proposal for the Third Amendment in 1789, and Congress's inclusion of it in the Bill of Rights, reflected a consensus that government-compelled housing of standing armies in private homes -- a physical fusion of military presence and private life -- was a paradigmatic violation of the liberty the Revolution had secured.

The Third Amendment is, by a wide margin, the least-litigated provision in the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court has never issued a ruling that turned primarily on the Third Amendment. The only notable appellate decision applying the amendment is Engblom v. Carey, 677 F.2d 957 (2d Cir. 1982). During a New York correction officers' strike in 1979, the state replaced the striking officers with National Guard troops and evicted the officers from their state-owned dormitory housing to billet the soldiers. Correctional officers Marianne Engblom and Charles Palmer, who had been living in dormitory rooms on the prison grounds, sued. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that: (1) the officers' dormitory rooms qualified as their 'houses' within the meaning of the Third Amendment, even though they did not own the rooms; (2) the Third Amendment is incorporated against the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, so state action was subject to its constraints; and (3) the National Guard troops constituted 'soldiers' for purposes of the Third Amendment. The Second Circuit remanded for further proceedings on the merits; the case ultimately settled. Because the Supreme Court has never reviewed a Third Amendment claim on the merits, the incorporation question and the precise scope of the amendment's terms remain formally open at the Supreme Court level.

The Third Amendment's most consequential appearance in constitutional law came not in a Third Amendment case but in Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965), where the Supreme Court struck Connecticut's criminal ban on the use of contraceptives by married couples. The state statute in question had no connection to soldiers or quartering; the Third Amendment appeared in the Griswold majority opinion as part of Justice William O. Douglas's theory of constitutional privacy. Douglas wrote for a 7-2 majority that, while the word 'privacy' does not appear in the Constitution, specific constitutional guarantees create 'zones of privacy' through their 'penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees.' He listed the Third Amendment -- protecting the sanctity of a man's home against the quartering of soldiers -- alongside the First Amendment's penumbra (association), the Fourth Amendment (searches and seizures), the Fifth Amendment's self-incrimination clause, and the Ninth Amendment (rights retained by the people) as provisions that, in combination, establish that privacy of the home and personal life is a constitutionally protected value. Justice Goldberg's concurrence, joined by Chief Justice Warren and Justice Brennan, relied more heavily on the Ninth Amendment as an independent source of the unenumerated right to privacy. The right-to-privacy precedent established in Griswold was extended in Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972) (unmarried persons), Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973) (abortion, grounded in 14th Amendment due process), Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003) (intimate conduct), and Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015) (same-sex marriage). Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022), overruled Roe and Casey; the Dobbs majority expressly declined to question Griswold, Lawrence, or Obergefell, while Justice Thomas's concurrence called for reconsidering each. The Third Amendment thus occupies a small but structurally important role: as one of the textual anchors for the constitutional right of privacy in the home that the Founders established and that Douglas incorporated into the modern privacy framework.

For the 2028 presidential election, the Third Amendment's direct practical relevance is limited -- a contemporary government order to house active-duty soldiers in private homes without statutory authority is essentially without precedent in modern American law. Its significance runs through two channels. First, the amendment's structural principle -- that the government may not commandeer private life and private spaces for state purposes without consent and without legal authorization -- informs civil-liberties debates about government surveillance, warrantless data collection, and the scope of executive authority in national-security and law-enforcement contexts. The Fourth Amendment's warrant and reasonableness requirements are the primary doctrinal vehicle for these disputes, but the Third Amendment reinforces the constitutional value underlying them: privacy of the home and person from government intrusion is not merely a policy preference but a structural commitment embedded in the Bill of Rights. Second, the Third Amendment's role in the Griswold penumbra keeps it relevant to debates over reproductive rights, the scope of constitutional privacy after Dobbs, and the future of unenumerated rights more broadly. Whether the Griswold privacy framework survives and how far it extends are live questions that candidates and judges will address in the years before and after the 2028 election. The 2028 winner will appoint federal judges -- potentially including Supreme Court Justices -- who will apply and shape the constitutional privacy framework rooted in part in the Third Amendment's guarantee.