The Library
Minnesota Law and Policy, Sourced
107 articles • 455 public sources • 226 statute citations • since June 7, 2026
Photo: Dave Madgett • Jay Cooke State Park107 articles • 455 public sources • 226 statute citations • since June 7, 2026
Photo: Dave Madgett • Jay Cooke State ParkThis is a research site with a byline, not a campaign brochure. Every factual claim here is tied to a named public source, and every article ends by listing what could not be verified — all 108 of those admissions are collected and searchable on The Receipts. Use any of it. Quote it, check it, or tell me where it is wrong.
The flagship series. One question about how Minnesota actually works, answered from a public dataset, with the table and the source in the piece.
Read the section →How Minnesota's laws land differently by race, income, age, disability, and geography. Every disparity carries its denominator and the innocent explanation is weighed first.
Read the section →What it would take for Minnesota to lead on artificial intelligence without waiting for Washington, and what the existing statutes already reach.
Read the section →Positions, argued from the record. Each one states the strongest objection to itself and concedes a point that cuts the other way.
Read the section →Occasional notes in the first person about the work, the race, and what came after it.
Read the section →A flat fee is a percentage that shrinks as income rises. Minnesota's $75 conviction surcharge is identical for a felony and a petty misdemeanor, the minimum fine underneath it is fixed at 30 percent of the statutory maximum and by law cannot be waived, and getting a revoked license back can cost $680. Minnesota already fixed the worst piece of this. Here is what is left, and the fix the state has already written into another statute.
ReadMinnesota's pretrial share of the jail population climbed from 50 percent in 2010 to 68 percent in 2019. The Rules of Criminal Procedure require a judge to set a cash figure that buys release with no conditions at all, which means the same defendant walks or stays depending on what is in the bank. Jail rates per 100,000: 107 white, 685 Black, 1,255 Native American. And a rule already on the books that nobody enforces.
ReadIn 2023 Minnesota added twenty-four words to the definitions section of the Human Rights Act. It did not write a grooming statute. It put hair texture and hair styles inside the word 'race,' which runs through the Act's employment, public-accommodations, education, housing, and public-services provisions. That changes what a worker sent home over her hair is holding. It does not change what she still has to prove, and Minnesota does not publish a single number telling us whether anyone has used it.
ReadMinnesota's red-flag law and its private-transfer background check have been argued about for three years by people quoting each other instead of the text. I pulled both statutes raw and read every subdivision. The red-flag law is not seizure on an anonymous tip — the list of who may petition is closed and short. The transfer law is not a registry — the record stays in your hands, not the state's. And there is a real due-process problem in the emergency order that neither side is being honest about.
ReadMinnesota is one of the states that compensates people it wrongly imprisoned. The Incarceration and Exoneration Remedies Act sets a floor of $50,000 per year of incarceration, a figure the Legislature wrote in 2014 and has never adjusted. In twelve years the state has appropriated money to pay seventeen people a total of $9,214,999.36. And the statute still routes a won award back to the Legislature 'for consideration as an appropriation,' which means winning and getting paid are two different events.
ReadThe gift-card scam runs on a script, and the script is the most useful thing anyone can hand you. Minnesota's gift-certificate law regulates fees and expiration dates — it says nothing about fraud. The financial-exploitation crime is real, but 'vulnerable adult' is a defined term, and most independently living retirees do not meet it. Here is what the statutes actually do, what reaches the caller, and why the money is almost never coming back.
ReadA $24.6 billion grocery merger was blocked in Portland in December 2024 by the FTC and nine state and district plaintiffs. Minnesota was not one of them. Minnesota's own antitrust law has been on the books for fifty-five years, it awards treble damages to shoppers who never bought a thing from the defendant, and it hands the Attorney General discovery power before a complaint is ever filed. This is an argument about the tool, not about the man holding it.
ReadSince January 1, 2025, advertising a price that leaves out a mandatory fee has been a deceptive trade practice in Minnesota. The prohibition is one sentence. The qualifications run nine paragraphs and three industry exemptions. I read all of it, because the carve-outs are where the money is — and because nothing in this law makes anything cheaper.
ReadChapter 103H says groundwater should be kept free from degradation caused by human activities, and it builds a ladder from voluntary practices to enforceable orders. The Groundwater Protection Rule wired the top of that ladder to public wells. In eight southeast counties, the people at risk are on private wells. Eleven organizations petitioned EPA in 2023 to force the issue. Here is exactly what EPA did, what it did not do, and what the state's own quarterly numbers show through March 31, 2026.
ReadState agency tables, court records, Census and BLS files, sentencing data. Linked, so you can check the work.
A disparity is a rate, not a count. Every one is stated per 100,000, per capita, or as a share of the population it is drawn from.
Offense mix, geography, age, income. If a gap has a benign cause, it gets said before anything else does.
No manufactured outrage. Each piece ends with a concrete reform, scaled to what the Legislature or an Attorney General can actually do.
Every article carries its sources. The whole corpus is also machine-readable: sources.json lists all 455 citations by article, dashboard.json holds the chart series, search.json is the full index, and feed.xml carries the newest 50 pieces. AI crawlers are allowed on purpose — see llms.txt.
Quote it with attribution to David J.S. Madgett and a link to the piece. If you find an error, write to campaign@madgettformn.com and it gets corrected on the page, in the open. Press materials and headshots are on the press page.