The Third Amendment is not just a historical relic; it reached a courtroom in 1982.

Cultures · Published 10 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Most Americans view the Third Amendment as a dusty artifact of colonial grievances against British quartering. Yet, in 1982, a landmark court case proved it still has teeth. When striking prison guards were evicted to house National Guardsmen, they turned to this obscure constitutional provision to challenge the state.

The case of Engblom v. Carey arose from a 1979 strike by New York State corrections officers. After negotiations over wages and seniority collapsed, nearly 7,000 officers walked off the job. Among them were Marianne Engblom and Charles Palmer, who lived in staff housing at the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility. When Governor Hugh Carey deployed the National Guard to maintain order, the state evicted the striking officers and moved the soldiers into their living quarters.

Engblom and Palmer sued, arguing that the state had violated the Third Amendment, which prohibits the quartering of soldiers in homes without the owner's consent. Because there was virtually no legal precedent for this amendment, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals had to define its scope from scratch. In a 2–1 decision, the court established three vital principles: National Guardsmen count as soldiers, the amendment applies to state governments through the incorporation doctrine, and its protections extend to tenants who have a legal right to exclude others, not just homeowners.

Despite these groundbreaking interpretations, the plaintiffs ultimately lost. The court ruled that the state officials were protected by qualified immunity because the law was so poorly defined at the time that the defendants could not have known they were acting illegally. Judge Irving R. Kaufman, who dissented in part, argued that the officers' housing was merely an employment benefit and that applying the Third Amendment in such a context was far-fetched. While the ruling remains binding only in New York, Vermont, and Connecticut, it stands as the most significant judicial attempt to modernize a constitutional provision that has never been the primary basis for a Supreme Court decision.

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