Tennessee landowners’ historic 2022 victory against warrantless spying will stand. In May, the Tennessee Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed that the Tennessee Constitution forbids state game wardens from entering land owned by Terry Rainwaters and Hunter Hollingsworth without a warrant. Our victory became final in July when the state decided not to appeal. The appellate court’s decision provides a model for how state courts across the country can start to rein in the federal open fields doctrine. 

A hundred years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court held that so-called open fields (a term of art that includes all private land except a tiny ring of land around your home) deserve zero Fourth Amendment protection. In a study published earlier this year, IJ found that the federal open fields doctrine exposes about 96% of all private land in the country—or about 1.2 billion acres—to warrantless searches by government officials. 

For years, Tennessee game wardens have relied on this doctrine to invade just about all land in the state. Terry and Hunter own farms that they have protected with gates and “no trespassing” signs to preserve their privacy. Yet they saw game wardens roaming their farms in full camo without a warrant several times. After finding spy cameras that game wardens had installed in their trees, Terry and Hunter finally had enough. 

With IJ’s help, they sued under the Tennessee Constitution to stop these intrusions. And that’s exactly what the recent Court of Appeals decision did. It held that the Tennessee Constitution’s textual protection for “possessions” secures all land put to “actual use”—whether by fencing, farming, posting, or otherwise—from warrantless searches. In other words, the court held that state officials can’t use the open fields doctrine because the Tennessee Constitution provides more protection. 

This decision doesn’t just help Terry and Hunter. It doesn’t even just help landowners in Tennessee (though millions in the state will benefit from it). Instead, the decision has the potential to help countless more folks across the country. For example, 15 other states—including Pennsylvania, where IJ currently has a nearly identical case before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court—have constitutions that similarly protect “possessions.” 

The decision also provides a solid building block for IJ’s long-term goal of challenging the open fields doctrine in federal court. While the Fourth Amendment doesn’t use the same “possessions” language, history makes clear that it was inspired by customs officers’ use of so-called general warrants—broad grants of power that allowed them to search homes and other property at their complete discretion. And the Tennessee Court of Appeals’ decision speaks directly to that problem. Warrantless searches under the open fields doctrine, the court explains, “bear a marked resemblance to the arbitrary discretionary entries of customs officials more than two centuries ago in colonial Boston.” 

Reining in the open fields doctrine will be a long battle. But state courts now have an excellent model for how they can use their independent constitutional text to reject the federal rule. And when enough state dominos have fallen, IJ will stand ready to take this issue into federal court—where we can end the open fields doctrine once and for all.

Joshua Windham is an IJ attorney and IJ’s Elfie Gallun Fellow in Freedom and the Constitution.