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Long take I wrote on what sustains a cultures values and the dream of a "Dark Bill of Rights" that could be unalterable and untarnish-able, like the 1400 year long tradition of Sharia.
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Notes -
Interesting read! One question.
Do you have any cites to further reading on this? The 3rd is basically never litigated, so there are basically no briefs that I'm aware of saying, "Here's what we think the original meaning is." Is there an interesting law review article somewhere? A historian somewhere? I'd love to nerd out on it.
Interesting case! Thanks for linking to it!
The way I read it, I think the gov't position was something along the lines of, "We still needed people living in these quarters to work in the prison, so we kicked out the people who weren't working and put in folks who were." I think the (somewhat unstated) position of the plaintiffs was, "Bullshit. You wanted to be dicks to us and make life harder for us because we went on strike; it's just a hardball move."
In any event, I think there's a sort of meaningful difference in intent here, regardless of how along this spectrum you think this case falls. In particular, what the gov't did was kick them out of their places. The OP speaks of the intent being "so as to observe all their private interactions and cripple their ability to interact and organize." Kicking them out could be used as a method of making them easier to observe, given some other argumentation, but I don't think there's much like that here. Instead, kicking them out would seem to make them hard to observe in most cases.
And frankly, I'm a bit unimpressed with the cites trying to connect the Third Amendment to a right to privacy. TBH, Griswold sort of just throws that in there, and it's the sort of free-floating prenumbras bullshit that really reads like motivated reasoning rather than any sort of serious historical scholarship. In Engblom, I don't actually see what invoking the word "privacy" even adds. It would be far simpler just to directly state something like, "Just like we don't require specific ownership rules for papers and effects for the Fourth Amendment, we don't for the Third, either." (Of course, I can genuinely see how the text of the Third Amendment specifically refers to the "owner", so I wouldn't be surprised if at least Gorsuch votes the other way.)
I guess what I really want is some history, not necessarily law. Some historical evidence that the Brits targeted revolutionaries to quarter their soldiers. It seems on first glance like this strategy would be a mixed bag, but maybe they did it.
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