Joshua Windham is a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice (IJ) and the co-director of IJ’s Project on the Fourth Amendment. He represented the plaintiffs in Punxsutawney Hunting Club v. Pennsylvania Game Commission and represents the plaintiffs in the Alabama and Louisiana lawsuits mentioned in this article.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has unanimously held that the state constitution generally requires a warrant to search privately marked land. The decision — the first state high court ruling in over three decades to reject the federal “open fields doctrine” — provides a model for sister courts that may soon weigh similar challenges.

The case, Punxsutawney Hunting Club v. Pennsylvania Game Commission, challenged state game wardens’ statutory authority to “enter any private property, posted or otherwise, outside of buildings, ” without a warrant. For years, a game warden repeatedly used that power to enter two private hunting clubs without a warrant, to roam around looking for evidence of hunting violations, and even to place a surveillance camera that stayed up for 78 days.

The clubs sued in 2021 to put a stop to these warrantless intrusions. But they faced two barriers: the Fourth Amendment open fields doctrine and a 2007 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision adopting that doctrine under the state’s constitutional analogue, Article I, Section 8.

For over a century, the U.S. Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment’s reference to “persons, houses, papers, and effects” does not protect land beyond the area immediately around the home, called the “curtilage.” The court has also held that even though the Fourth Amendment protects “reasonable expectations of privacy” beyond those listed in the plain text, it is always unreasonable to expect privacy on one’s own land — even land that is fenced or posted with “no trespassing” signs. The open fields doctrine, as it is known, exposes at least 96 percent of all private land in the country to warrantless searches.

Some state supreme courts have rejected the open fields doctrine under their state constitutions, most recently the Montana Supreme Court in 1995. But until now, that door seemed to be shut in Pennsylvania. In a 2007 case called Commonwealth v. Russo, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held “that the guarantees of Article I, Section 8 of the Pennsylvania Constitution do not extend to open fields; federal and state law, in this area, are coextensive.”

Punxsutawney unanimously overruled Russo and rejected the open fields doctrine under Article I, Section 8. That clause, whose text predates the Fourth Amendment, expressly protects something its federal counterpart does not: “possessions.” That difference was crucial, the court reasoned, because a trove of founding-era dictionaries, statutes, and court cases showed that “the original meaning of the term ‘possessions’ as used in Article I, Section 8, unlike the term ‘effects’ in the Fourth Amendment, includes land.”

Further, the historical context in which the provision was adopted confirmed that people can reasonably expect privacy on their privately marked land, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court reasoned. Early Pennsylvanians rejected “arbitrary searches” of property by British customs officers. And they “adopted certain aspects of English common law — including its treatment of an invasion of private land as a trespass — as [their] own.” Against that backdrop, the high court could see “no reason to believe that the antipathy of the framers of Pennsylvania’s original Constitution for arbitrary searches did not extend to open fields, at least those open fields that are improved, enclosed, and/or marked to exclude intruders.”

The current court believed Russo got both points wrong. The decision failed to meaningfully analyze the term “possessions, ” and it failed to grapple with Pennsylvania’s historical aversion to arbitrary searches and respect for landowners’ right to exclude intruders. For these and other reasons (the majority opinion was 83 pages long), the court unanimously overruled Russo.

That left one question: whether to strike down the statutes that allowed game wardens to enter private land without a warrant. And with Russo’s shield removed, the answer was clear: Article I, Section 8 protects “land beyond the curtilage over which the landowner has demonstrated a reasonable and legitimate expectation of privacy by taking sufficient steps to exclude intruders therefrom.” Thus, officials “must obtain a warrant based upon probable cause or satisfy one of the recognized exceptions to the warrant requirement before entering the private land of any landowner that has taken such steps.” Because the statutes allowed officials to do the opposite, the high court declared them invalid.

Punxsutawney will have both short-term and long-term impacts. The immediate impact is that far more land in Pennsylvania is now eligible for protection from warrantless searches by state officials. (Federal officials enforcing federal law will not be bound by Punxsutawney due to the U.S. Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.) Before this decision, under 10 percent of all private land in Pennsylvania would have counted as protected curtilage under the federal open fields doctrine. Now, 100 percent of all private land in Pennsylvania — over 21 million acres — is eligible for state constitutional protection. All a person must do is visibly mark his land to exclude intruders.

The long-term impact is that Punxsutawney will have shockwaves in states across the country as sister courts hear similar challenges to the open fields doctrine. Several other states have search clauses that, like Pennsylvania’s, protect “possessions” from warrantless searches. Other states’ search clauses mirror the Fourth Amendment yet have been interpreted to protect privacy beyond what the U.S. Supreme Court has been willing to protect. And there has been a groundswell of new litigation (including pending cases in Alabama and Louisiana) challenging the open fields doctrine under state constitutions. Given all that, Punxsutawney’s textual and historical analysis could very well inspire courts across the country to stand up and reject the open fields doctrine.

Suggested Citation: Joshua Windham, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Rejects Warrantless Searches of Private Land, Sᴛᴀᴛᴇ Cᴏᴜʀᴛ Rᴇᴘᴏʀᴛ (Aug. 3, 2026), https://statecourtreport.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/pennsylvania-supreme-court-rejects-warrantless-searches-private-land