Landmark Victory For Renters’ Privacy And Property Rights

Some victories arrive as thunderclaps; others come like the slow lifting of a long, oppressive fog. Our rental-inspection challenge in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, was the latter—a case that began in 2017 and wound its way through years of procedural traps, vanished documents, sudden turns, and hard-won breakthroughs. Yet IJ and our clients endured. The storm did its worst, and now, at last, the sky has opened with a clear message: Come back with a warrant.

In December, a Pennsylvania appeals court issued a unanimous precedential ruling holding that the commonwealth’s constitution requires individualized probable cause before the government can enter a rented home. In doing so, the court declined to follow the U.S. Supreme Court’s diminished approach to “administrative warrants,” instead restoring the full force of Pennsylvania’s own search-and-seizure protections. It is the first ruling of its kind in the nation.

The path to this moment was anything but straightforward. Simply bringing the case required exquisite timing: file too early and courts dismiss the claim as unripe, but file too late and they deem it moot. Once filed, the case encountered every obstacle imaginable—restricted discovery, the removal of a trial judge, municipal files that vanished and had to be resurrected through forensic analysis, and a hard-fought appellate battle just to obtain records showing how Pottstown actually wielded its inspection powers. 

Along the way, inspectors’ own notes confirmed what tenants had long feared: Intimate details of their private lives (gathered by searching bedrooms, bathrooms, and other areas) were shared casually, and the inspection program had become a ready-made backdoor for law enforcement.

And yet, when the appellate court finally confronted the constitutional question, the answer arrived with clarity and conviction. The Pennsylvania Constitution protects the sanctity of the home for everyone. Renters are not second-class citizens whose living spaces canbe entered on a government schedule. The federal standard may have drifted, but Pennsylvania’s has not.

This ruling now places every municipality in the commonwealth on notice. Rental inspections are not abolished—but forced entry without individualized probable cause is. Where towns once relied on administrative warrants as routine, they must now confront the constitutional limits they long overlooked. 

For the ordinary Pennsylvanians at the center of this lawsuit—people who simply want to live in peace, free from unwarranted intrusion—this decision marks a profound moment of empowerment.

And for IJ, it is something more: a reminder that state constitutions remain powerful sources of liberty, capable of strengthening rights federal doctrine has allowed to thin. Sometimes the storms of litigation rage with cruel fury. But when they pass—and they do pass—the returning light can reveal a landscape transformed.

This ruling is that kind of light.

Rob Peccola is IJ’s special counsel for litigation and development.