Definition
The compelled billeting of military personnel in private homes or other civilian dwellings — that is, requiring civilian owners or occupants to provide soldiers with lodging, board, or both. The term describes both the historical practice and the constitutional prohibition against it.
In American constitutional law, quartering of soldiers is governed by the Third Amendment to the United States Constitution, which 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 except in a manner prescribed by law. The Amendment operates as an absolute bar in peacetime (absent owner consent) and a procedural constraint in wartime (requiring legislative authorization before compelled billeting can occur).
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Quartering" in ordinary English refers to dividing something into four parts, or to the heraldic practice of dividing a coat of arms. In a military context, "quarters" means lodgings or accommodations assigned to military personnel.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's defines "quartering" in the military sense as "the act of assigning quarters to soldiers," and "quarters" as "the place where officers or troops are lodged or assembled."
The legal meaning does not diverge sharply from the military common meaning, but the constitutional dimension is invisible in ordinary usage. When a researcher or reader encounters "quartering" in a legal source, the term carries specific constitutional weight — it is not merely a logistical arrangement but a prohibited government imposition on private property and domestic privacy. The common usage misses entirely the coercive, state-compelled character that makes the term legally significant.
---
Why It Matters in Research
The Third Amendment is the least-litigated provision of the Bill of Rights. Researchers will find almost no federal case law directly applying it, which creates a particular hazard: the absence of doctrine does not mean the Amendment is unimportant to constitutional history or theory. For corpus research, the term matters in several distinct ways.
First, historical sources use "quartering" in its colonial and early American context, where the practice was a concrete grievance against British military occupation — particularly under the Quartering Acts of 1765 and 1774. Sources from that period treat quartering as a live political and legal issue, not a dead-letter constitutional curiosity. Researchers working in founding-era materials should expect the term to carry urgent practical meaning.
Second, modern constitutional scholarship has increasingly examined the Third Amendment as a structural provision bearing on privacy, federalism, and the civil-military relationship — not merely as a historical artifact. Corpus connections run to Fourth Amendment privacy doctrine, the Posse Comitatus Act, and debates over military deployment in domestic contexts. Researchers following these threads should not treat the Third Amendment as a standalone provision.
Third, the distinction between peacetime and wartime operation is constitutionally significant and appears explicitly in the text. Bouvier's entry correctly identifies this structure. Sources that treat the Amendment as a flat prohibition (without noting the wartime exception) are imprecise and may mislead researchers about the Amendment's actual scope.
Fourth, the term "house" in the Amendment has received limited judicial construction. Whether it extends to apartments, commercial property, or other structures remains largely untested. Researchers examining property rights or civil-military relations in modern contexts should note this gap in the doctrine.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides a compact but accurate entry, correctly quoting the Third Amendment text and directing readers to Cooley's Constitutional Limitations and Rawle's View of the Constitution — two foundational nineteenth-century treatises on American constitutional law. Both Cooley and Rawle treat the quartering prohibition as a structural protection against military overreach in civilian life, rooted in the colonial experience with British troops.
Bouvier's entry is representative of how mid-to-late nineteenth-century legal dictionaries handled the Third Amendment: accurate quotation of the text, reference to leading treatises, and little elaboration. This reflects the Amendment's practical dormancy in that era rather than any underestimation of its importance. No historical dictionary in the Law Mind corpus provides meaningful case-law analysis, because none existed to report.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss is the Amendment's modern theoretical role. Late twentieth and early twenty-first century scholarship has argued that the Third Amendment underlies broader privacy and anti-militarism norms embedded in the Constitution — arguments that Bouvier's generation had no occasion to develop.
---
Jurisdictional Note
The Third Amendment applies as a matter of federal constitutional law. Whether it applies to the states through incorporation under the Fourteenth Amendment has not been definitively settled by the Supreme Court. The Second Circuit addressed incorporation in Engblom v. Carey (1982), holding that the Amendment does apply to the states, but this remains the only significant appellate treatment of the question.
---
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia: "The Third Amendment — Quartering of Soldiers (Historical and Modern Relevance)" (constitutional_121)
---