The Library
Minnesota Law and Policy, Sourced
120 articles • 626 public sources • 341 statute citations • since June 7, 2026
Photo: Dave Madgett • Jay Cooke State Park120 articles • 626 public sources • 341 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 124 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 →Minnesota's Legislature writes organizations' names directly into its budget laws, 1,122 times from 2021 to 2026, and the lines in this piece carry no condition that would stop the money. I screened 502 organizations. I didn't find a hidden fraud ring. I found a Legislature that kept restating lines after the state's own watchdogs had put a problem on paper, and agencies that paid because the law said to. Here's the record, the other side's case, and the sentence that fixes it.
ReadOn October 1 the Attorney General's office sued Refocus Recovery, a peer-recovery nonprofit that stopped operating in September 2024, for passing nearly all its Medicaid money to its founder's for-profit company. The allegations are serious and unproven. But the structure isn't the scandal. Kaiser Permanente's nonprofit health plan paid one medical group $16.2 billion in 2024. The forest is a Minnesota rule that only lets a nonprofit bill Medicaid as a recovery community organization, so a for-profit that wanted in had to build one. The complaint leans on Refocus's tax return for its numbers and never mentions what that return says about recusal. Here's the record, the other side's case, and a fix.
ReadA CNN clip of Attorney General Keith Ellison cutting off a question about sponsored travel is circulating again. The reporting is from March 2025. CNN asked why he goes on trips sponsored by corporate lobbyists. The records it reported raise the questions that matter more, who paid, who was there and what was discussed, and I can't find that his office has ever answered them. Minnesota's statement of economic interest never asks about travel by name; the honorarium line is the one place it might reach. Wisconsin's form asks. The U.S. House makes members file within 15 days. Here's the record, the other side's best case, and a fix that costs nothing.
ReadEvery Minnesota county is required to run a conciliation court. The jurisdictional limit is $20,000 — raised from $15,000 in 2024 — the court administrator has to help you fill out the form, and a lawyer is optional. In 2025, 61,393 conciliation cases were filed, up 63 percent since 2021. There is a second, much lower limit that only binds the creditor suing you. There are four numbers the state does not publish. And there is one thing this forum cannot do for you at all.
ReadMinn. Stat. § 13.824 requires the BCA to post the locations of fixed automated license plate readers on its website, and it does: as of September 10, 2026, 116 agencies, 747 named locations, 17 more withheld as security information. Statewide, camera density tracks city size, not race. Inside Minneapolis, the 28 mappable readers sit in tracts that are 39.0 percent non-Hispanic white against 58.0 percent citywide — and once you hold the arterial and the reported crime rate constant, that gap disappears. The disclosure law works. The published list is still a text file with no coordinates, no counts, and no dates.
ReadOne adjustment formula governs the homestead, the car, the tools, and the wildcard. On July 1, 2026 it moved the homestead cap 5.9 percent and the ordinary motor-vehicle cap 2.0 percent, because each raise is a slice of a base amount and the car's base is still $2,000. Two exemptions are excluded from the formula by name and have sat at $13,000 since 1989 — down 62.7 percent in purchasing power. And the state's own notice of the new figures was wrong twice before it was right.
ReadRed Lake County has zero certified nursing homes. Seventeen more counties have one building each, at a median of 46 beds, and nine of those seventeen have already lost one since 2012. But the closures do not track population loss — in all 40 counties that lost a nursing home, the 65-and-over population was larger in 2024 than in 2020. What separates the counties is not who closed. It is who got replaced.
ReadThe charity-care statute sets no income line — the hospital's own policy does. The one income number in Minnesota's charity-care law, 275 percent of the federal poverty guideline, is a reporting category in an administrative rule, not a right. The screening duty reaches uninsured patients and hospitals, not insured patients and not clinics. And the state's own hospital file shows $202.8 million written off as bad debt in 2024 rather than as charity care.
ReadAcross 273 Minnesota school systems in school year 2017-18 — the most recent year both federal files can be joined — the correlation between revenue per pupil and reading proficiency is negative, −0.45. That is not a finding about money. It is an artifact of a formula that sends dollars toward measured need: economic disadvantage alone explains 62 percent of the district-level variation in reading, and adding revenue to the model moves the explained share from 0.645 to 0.649. What the public files can and cannot answer, which dataset would answer it, and who would have to publish it.
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 626 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.