Third Amendment

Third Amendment The Constitution's Third Amendment, which forbids nonconsensual quartering of soldiers in private homes during peacetime, lies almost forgotten among the Bill of Rights. It has been neither the source of much judicial concern nor the object of extensive academic or political controversy. Yet its subject was of great importance to the framers of the Constitution, and it has recently received a modest new lease on life as one of the foundations of the modern constitutional right to privacy.

The English Bill of Rights of 1689, the result of the seventeenth‐century struggle against Stuart authoritarianism, listed the forced quartering of troops among the worst abuses committed by King James II. The increased British military presence prior to and during the American Revolution revived these fears, and contributed to the view of American colonists that they were being deprived of the traditional rights of Englishmen. This sense of deprivation led to the ratification of the Third Amendment in 1791.

The Supreme Court has never decided a case dealing directly with the issue of forced quartering of troops, although the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in Engblom v. Carey (1982) did hold that the Third Amendment applied to the National Guard while on state duty. The Amendment remains one of the few provisions of the Bill of Rights that the Supreme Court has not incorporated into the Fourteenth Amendment and thus made directly applicable to the states (see Incorporation Doctrine). The philosophy of the amendment was an important component of Justice William O. Douglas's opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) that a constitutional right of privacy could be constructed from the commitment to personal autonomy found in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights.

Robert J. Cottrol