The Third Amendment

The Third Amendment provides that 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 answered a grievance listed in the Declaration of Independence, which accused the king of quartering large bodies of armed troops among the colonists. Quartering Acts passed by Parliament in 1765 and 1774 had required colonies to house British soldiers, and memories of them made protection of the home against military intrusion a priority for the founding generation.

The amendment is the least litigated part of the Bill of Rights. The Supreme Court has never decided a case based primarily on it. The best-known lower court decision, Engblom v. Carey in 1982, held that striking prison guards who lived in state-provided housing could invoke it when National Guard troops were housed in their residences, and treated it as applying to the states. Most attempts to invoke it against police or other officials have failed because they are not soldiers.

The amendment's greater influence has been as a symbol of the privacy of the home and of civilian control over the military. In Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, the Court cited it alongside other amendments as evidence of zones of privacy protected by the Bill of Rights. Its wartime clause leaves quartering to Congress, reflecting the framers' view that even necessary military demands on civilians should be governed by law rather than by commanders.