Has there been any court cases regarding the Third Amendment to the United States Constitution?

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In Engblom v Carey (1979) Judge Walter R. Mansfield, writing for the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, found that:

  1. that the National Guardsmen qualify as soldiers under the Third Amendment;

  2. that the Third Amendment applies to state as well as federal authorities, i.e., is incorporated against the states; and

  3. that the protection of the Third Amendment extends beyond home owners, that is, those only with a fee simple arrangement, but includes anyone who, within their residence, has a legal expectation of privacy and a legal right to exclude others from entry into the premises.

My opinion is that this article will never be obsolete because of its long history of abuse during both the Counter Reformation and, as noted in the Declaration of Independence itself, the prelude to the American Revolutionary War.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

...

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For example, in Counter Reformation France it was common to billet soldiers (dragonnades) (Aside: for Empire Total War fans, this is likely why dragoons, only, have a repression bonus.) in (Protestant) Hugenot households with explicit instructions to "be careless, and break things", as a means of coercing conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Looking beyond such blatant abuses:

  1. It is a form of taxation (active young men consume a lot of provisions) that is entirely within the purview of the Executive branch. This puts it outside the checks and balances so carefully constructed by the Founders.

  2. It is in fact a form of attainder (ie the loss of civil rights, specifically privacy within one's home, without trial), as its use can be arbitrarily directed against named individuals at executive discretion and it is de facto the imposition of a punishment against those named individuals.

Note also that the Treaties of Münster and Osnabrück explicitly state in regard to sovereign states, that their governments:

shall enjoy without contradiction, the Right of Suffrage in all Deliberations touching the Affairs of the Empire; but above all, when the Business in hand shall be the ..., levying or quartering of Soldiers ...

This model of state sovereignty remains the model of our current international order, as well as being that within which the U.S. Constitution was formulated; so it grants to the Federal government by international convention and treaty any rights not explicitly removed or reassigned by the Constitution.

Upvote:4

The 3rd amendment states:

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.

The only court case relating to the 3rd amendment would appear to be Engblom v. Carey. This resulted from a strike by correction officers in New York state were evicted from their accommodation to make way for National Guardsmen who were called in to replace the correction officers.

As per this Cornell Law School site,

...save for the curious case of Engblom v. Carey, 677 F.2d 957 (2d Cir. 1982), on remand, 572 F. Supp. 44 (S.D.N.Y. 1983), aff’d per curiam, 724 F.2d 28 (2d Cir. 1983), there has been no judicial explication of the Amendment at all.

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