Pennsylvania Has Trashed Our Fourth Amendment Protections<\/a>.\u201d In addition to the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC) relentlessly attacking a private hunting club, a constituent a while back contacted me to report what he believed was illegal and improper behavior by Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission (PFBC). Claiming the resident had violated fishing regulations on his own pond. The officer loudly intruded and stomped past his cancer-ridden wife who was bathing.
\nWhen I contacted the PFBC, I was told \u201cwe regulate every single body of water in the Commonwealth\u201d and \u201cthere are two sides to every story.\u201d<\/p>\nWell, there certainly is now.<\/p>\n
What the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did today was reject this ludicrous loophole \u2013 the ability of law enforcement to conduct warrantless searches of privately owned property \u2013 created out of thin air by the United States Supreme Court decades ago:<\/p>\n
\u201c\u2026 open fields do not provide the setting for those intimate activities that the Amendment is intended to shelter from government interference or surveillance. There is no societal interest in protecting the privacy of those activities, such as the cultivation of crops, that occur in open fields.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pennsylvania\u2019s Supreme Court today unanimously affirmed that Article 1, Section 8 of our constitution, which states, in part: \u201cThe people shall be secure in their persons, houses, papers and possessions from unreasonable searches and seizures,\u201d applies to \u201copen fields of any landowner that has demonstrated a reasonable expectation of privacy by taking sufficient steps to exclude intruders therefrom\u201d and as such, government officials \u201cmust obtain a warrant based upon probable cause or satisfy one of the recognized exceptions to the warrant requirement before entering such property.\u201d<\/p>\n
And while the Court as a whole did not address how Article 1, Section 8 applies specifically to open fields on which lesser steps have been taken to exclude intruders, Justices Wecht and McCaffery asserted that Pennsylvania\u2019s constitution further protects landowners\u2019 expectation \u201cthat their land is protected against arbitrary and warrantless government entries\u201d whether or not they post warnings against trespassing.<\/p>\n
That is why, as a lifelong sportsman and property owner I am very pleased with today\u2019s ruling putting Pennsylvania private property protection on par with the seven states that have outright rejected the federal open fields doctrine under their own constitutions \u2013 Mississippi, Montana, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, and Washington \u2013 because their state constitutions provide greater protection than an invented federal loophole.<\/p>\n
What we must watch for now are the governor, the state Senate and House joining forces with the PFBC and PGC to somehow water down this landmark ruling to allow their continued unconstitutional behavior.<\/p>\n
\u201cUnconstitutional\u201d means \u201cagainst the law,\u201d and therefore illegal. Private property rights and not paying taxes are literally what this nation was founded on.<\/p>\n
\nRepresentative David Maloney
\n130th District
\nPennsylvania House of Representatives<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"July 21, 2026 HARRISBURG \u2013 Great news for Pennsylvania sportsmen, homeowners and landowners, after lengthy deliberation, the state…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220409,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":["post-248799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}