Pennsylvania Has Trashed Our Fourth Amendment Protections

By Rep. David Maloney (R-Berks), July 17, 2025
James Madison wrote that “a man’s land … is called his property” and that “government is instituted to protect property of every sort.”

The Democrats on the House Game and Fisheries Committee this week voted as a bloc to reject bills and amendments that would have helped to begin to correct the many flaws in their proposed bills on Sunday hunting, which would further degrade Pennsylvania’s already shoddy record of “protections” of private property rights.

Rep. Mandy Steele, (D-Allegheny) encouraged the panel to support her legislation to remove completely the ban on Sunday hunting in Pennsylvania. In this legislation, private property rights are again trampled on. The bill would allow anyone to trespass on property if they are “looking for their hunting dog.” There is no requirement to notify the landowner(s) and there is no need to offer the slightest evidence that the dog is lost on a particular property.

To prevent such abuse of private property rights, I offered an amendment that would have Pennsylvania do away with the antiquated “Open Fields Doctrine” as several other states have already done through state courts. However, the Democrats denied all efforts to address this abuse of your property rights.

“This ill-thought-out legal concept was invented by the Supreme Court; it is not a law passed by Congress and signed by the president. The Supreme Court kept eroding our Fourth Amendment rights under this federal overreach until finally arriving at an opinion in Oliver v. United States that a privacy expectation regarding an open field is unreasonable:”

“… 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.”

This “legal doctrine” was used extensively during prohibition so federal agents, without any warrants, could roam the woods and other folk’s property at leisure looking for illegal stills. It has always been unconstitutional, and several states have prohibited its application as a clear violation of their own states’ constitutional protections against trespassing and illegal search and seizure in order to properly protect their citizens, which every committee Democrat declined to do this week.

Last year, a state appellate court in Tennessee ruled the federal Open Fields Doctrine violates the state’s protections against illegal search and seizure. Two landowners successfully challenged a statute that allowed game wardens to go onto their private land without a warrant to look for evidence of hunting violations. Game wardens used that power to repeatedly enter the plaintiffs’ farms (wearing full camouflage outfits) and place cameras — all without consent, a warrant or even probable cause.

Currently, there are pending cases against the Open Fields Doctrine in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Louisiana. The Pennsylvania case is currently before the state supreme court. Members of the Punxsutawney and Pitch Pine hunting clubs have been increasingly targeted and harassed by state game wardens even though their vast acreages are painstakingly marked, posted and protected by locked gates.

Since Oliver, state courts in Montana, New York, Oregon, Vermont and Washington states have held that the Open Fields Doctrine does not apply in those states due to their state constitutions granting greater protections to its citizens and Pennsylvania should do the same.