Constitution

The Third Amendment: Quartering of Soldiers

The Third Amendment bars the government from forcing homeowners to quarter soldiers in peacetime, and in war only as the law prescribes.

4Conservative Editors · Published November 8, 2026

The text

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.

In plain English

The Third Amendment is the shortest and least litigated of the Bill of Rights.

In peacetime. No soldier may be quartered in any house without the owner's consent. The word "consent" is plain: a homeowner may agree, but no one may compel it.

In wartime. Soldiers may be quartered, but only "in a manner to be prescribed by law." The law must be an act of the legislature. The commander cannot decide on his own authority which house will be used.

The Amendment protects the home against military intrusion and keeps the military subordinate to civilian law. It reflects a view, shared by the Founders, that standing armies are a threat to liberty if not firmly controlled.

It does not apply to ordinary police officers, who are not "soldiers," and the Quartering Acts of Parliament, which gave rise to it, are among the grievances of the Declaration of Independence.

What the Founders said

The Declaration of Independence complained that the king had kept "among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our Legislatures" and was "quartering large bodies of armed troops among us." The Quartering Act of 1765 and later acts required colonial governments to house and supply British soldiers, and after Boston's resistance, the Quartering Act of 1774 was one of the measures called the Intolerable Acts.

Several state constitutions of 1776 to 1780, including those of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Maryland, contained quartering provisions. The ratifying conventions of Virginia, North Carolina and New York proposed similar limits, and Madison included the language in his draft of the Bill of Rights.

The principle fits with Article I's limit on army appropriations to two years and with the Second Amendment's concern for civilian control of force.

How the courts have read it

There is almost no Supreme Court law on the Third Amendment. The Court has never decided a case turning on it.

  • Griswold v. Connecticut (1965): Justice Douglas listed the Third Amendment among the provisions whose "penumbras" create zones of privacy; the argument was criticized by others, and the case remains controversial.
  • Engblom v. Carey (2d Cir. 1982): the leading lower-court decision, holding that National Guardsmen, who had taken over prison employees' housing during a strike, were "soldiers" and that the tenants had a Third Amendment claim.
  • Mitchell v. City of Henderson (D. Nev. 2015): a district court rejected a claim by homeowners whose house police used during an investigation, holding that police officers are not soldiers.

Why it matters now

The Third Amendment is a good test of how the Constitution works. A right that is almost never litigated is a right that has been successfully protected. The Framers' wariness of military power over civilians turned into a settled American habit, so that the question seldom arises.

That reasoning applies more broadly. Conservatives who prize limited government see in the Amendment a principle of civil-military relations: the military answers to elected civilians, and the home is a protected sphere. Debates over the use of military forces in domestic roles, the militarization of local police, and emergency powers all touch the same concern.

The Amendment is also a reminder that some of the Constitution's protections are structural and some are specific, and that both matter. It is one of the clear examples of the Founders' habit of making a general fear, here of standing armies, into a concrete rule.

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