Minnesota has an anti-SLAPP law today. It did not have a usable one for seven years, and the exact date the hole closed — May 25, 2024 — still decides cases, because the new act carries a savings clause that leaves older claims sitting in the hole.
That is the short answer. The long answer is worth the reading time, because most of what gets said about Leiendecker v. Asian Women United of Minnesota is wrong in the same two ways: people describe an as-applied holding as though it were facial, and they treat the 2017 decision and the 2014 decision as one case. They are not one case. The 2014 decision built the constitutional problem that the 2017 decision then had to solve.
I have set out below what the supreme court actually held, what happened in Minnesota courts during the interregnum, what chapter 554 now contains section by section, and — the part I care most about as a practitioner — what a Minnesota defendant sued over speech should do in the first sixty days.
Yes, and the date matters more than you think
The Uniform Public Expression Protection Act is codified at Minn. Stat. §§ 554.07 to 554.20. It was enacted as article 18 of a large judiciary and public-safety omnibus, 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 123 (H.F. 5216) — an act whose title recites that it is “appropriating money for judiciary, public safety, and corrections,” and whose article 1 is captioned “APPROPRIATIONS” and carries appropriation items. That matters for dating it. Neither § 645.02 default governs: not the general August 1 rule, and not the rule that “[a]n appropriation act or an act having appropriation items” takes effect “at the beginning of the first day of July next following its final enactment.” Article 18 supplies its own date:
This article is effective the day following final enactment and applies to a civil action pending on or commenced on or after that date.
2024 Minn. Laws ch. 123, art. 18, § 17. The session-law record shows the bill was presented to the governor on May 22, 2024, and signed on May 24, 2024, at 9:15 a.m. The day following final enactment is May 25, 2024.
Now read the codified savings clause, which points the other direction:
Sections 554.07 to 554.19 do not affect a cause of action asserted before May 25, 2024, in a civil action or a motion under Minnesota Statutes 2022, sections 554.01 to 554.06, regarding the cause of action.
Minn. Stat. § 554.19. Put the two sentences side by side. The act reaches a civil action that was already pending on May 25, 2024; it does not reach a cause of action that had already been asserted by that date. The unit of measurement changes between the two provisions, and the codified sentence is the narrower one. I read them together to mean this: in an action filed in 2023 that is still open, a claim pleaded in 2023 is outside UPEPA, but a claim first pleaded by amendment in 2025 is inside it. A defendant who inherits an older file should date every count before touching the motion.
For a cause of action asserted before May 25, 2024, the only anti-SLAPP procedure available is the one the supreme court took apart. Which brings us to what it actually did.
What Leiendecker held, and the three things it declined to hold
Leiendecker v. Asian Women United of Minnesota, 895 N.W.2d 623 (Minn. 2017) (No. A16-0360), was the fifth lawsuit between a nonprofit and its former executive director and her husband. By the time it reached the supreme court the only independently actionable claim left was malicious prosecution — a tort, seeking money.
The old statute’s procedure lived in a four-clause subdivision. Two of those clauses told the district court what to do:
(2) the responding party has the burden of proof, of going forward with the evidence, and of persuasion on the motion;
(3) the court shall grant the motion and dismiss the judicial claim unless the court finds that the responding party has produced clear and convincing evidence that the acts of the moving party are not immunized from liability under section 554.03; and
Minn. Stat. 2022, § 554.02, subd. 2(2)–(3). (The other two clauses suspended discovery and let a government body or the attorney general intervene to support the movant.) The court held that clauses 2 and 3 collide with Article I, Section 4 of the Minnesota Constitution, which provides that the “right of trial by jury shall remain inviolate, and shall extend to all cases at law without regard to the amount in controversy.” Leiendecker, 895 N.W.2d at 634. The defect was doubled. The clauses “transfer the jury’s fact-finding role to the district court,” and they require the responding party to meet “a higher burden of proof before trial (clear and convincing evidence) than it would have to meet at trial (preponderance of the evidence).” Id. at 636.
The sentence that does the real work comes a page later, when the court distinguishes the anti-SLAPP law from ordinary statutory immunities:
The Legislature can immunize a category of people from lawsuits, but it cannot interpose the district court as the fact-finder in actions at law.
Id. at 637. Severability then finished the job. Under Minn. Stat. § 645.20 provisions are severable unless the remainder is “incomplete and . . . incapable of being executed,” and without clauses 2 and 3 the section “provides no procedure for courts to determine whether a lawsuit violates the substantive prohibition of Minn. Stat. § 554.03.” Id. at 638. Section 554.02 came out whole.
Now the three limits, all of which sit in the opinion and all of which get dropped in the retelling.
It was as-applied, not facial. The court granted the defendants’ petition for accelerated review. It denied the Leiendeckers’ cross-petition on facial invalidity outright: “The Leiendeckers also petitioned for accelerated review on their claims that the anti-SLAPP law is facially unconstitutional. We denied that petition.” Id. at 630–31 n.2. The holding is stated in as-applied terms every single time it appears — “unconstitutional as applied to claims at law alleging torts.”
It did not reach constitutional-rights claims. Old § 554.03 stripped immunity where the conduct “constitutes a tort or a violation of a person’s constitutional rights.” Footnote 5 reserves the second half: “As only one claim remains in this action, a tort claim for malicious prosecution, we do not need to decide whether the anti-SLAPP law is unconstitutional as applied to alleged violations of a person’s constitutional rights.” Id. at 635–36 n.5.
It left the substantive immunity standing. The court said so in terms: the anti-SLAPP law “creates a substantive immunity,” and “[n]or are Minnesota’s substantive immunities affected by our holding that Minn. Stat. § 554.02 is unconstitutional as applied to claims at law alleging torts.” Id. at 637. What died was the procedure, not the shield. Chief Justice Gildea dissented, and her objection was that the majority reached a constitutional question it did not need to reach, and that “courts are likely to see” summary-judgment challenges built on the majority’s rule. Id. at 638–40 (Gildea, C.J., dissenting).
So the technically correct description of Minnesota law from May 24, 2017 to May 24, 2024 is narrow: § 554.03’s immunity survived, § 554.02’s procedure did not, and no one had a way to invoke the surviving immunity before trial. In practice that is a distinction without a difference. An immunity you can only prove to a jury is a defense, not an immunity.
The 2014 decision is the one that set the trap
There is an earlier Leiendecker in the reporters, and conflating it with the 2017 case makes the history unintelligible.
In Leiendecker v. Asian Women United of Minnesota, 848 N.W.2d 224 (Minn. 2014) (Nos. A12-1978, A12-2015), the same parties fought over what “clear and convincing evidence” meant in clause 3. The court of appeals had held that allegations in a complaint sufficed. The supreme court reversed and read the statute honestly: “produce[]” means produce, “evidence” is not allegations, and reading subdivisions 2(2) and 2(3) together, “the responding party bears the burden to persuade the trier of fact — here, the district court — of the truth of a proposition.” Id. at 231. It also held that the summary-judgment standard could not be grafted on, because § 554.02 requires dismissal “even in the face of genuine issues of material fact” if the plaintiff fails to persuade. Id. at 231.
The court then noted, pointedly, what was not in front of it: “The Leiendeckers disclaim any argument that the anti-SLAPP statutes actually violate their jury-trial right.” Id. at 232.
That is the whole story in two moves. The 2014 court construed the statute to require a judge to find facts by an elevated standard. The 2017 court held that a statute requiring a judge to find facts by an elevated standard cannot stand against Article I, Section 4. The second holding was made inevitable by the first, and the 2017 opinion says as much when it explains why the constitutional claim was not waived: the challenge “was not ripe” until the 2014 construction existed. 895 N.W.2d at 631–33.
The warning had been on the page even earlier. In Middle-Snake-Tamarac Rivers Watershed District v. Stengrim, 784 N.W.2d 834 (Minn. 2010) (No. A08-825) — the court’s first construction of the chapter, which called it “a unique procedural framework,” id. at 839 — a footnote observed that anti-SLAPP statutes “may raise constitutional concerns because the statutes, to some degree, protect a defendant’s exercise of the right of petition, and in so doing, potentially affect a plaintiff’s right of petition.” Id. at 842–43 n.9. Seven years of legislative silence followed anyway.
What Minnesota looked like with no anti-SLAPP law at all
Two decisions bracketing the changeover show what the vacuum did, and both turn on forum shopping. Neither is precedential — under Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c), “[n]onprecedential opinions and order opinions are not binding authority except as law of the case, res judicata or collateral estoppel, but nonprecedential opinions may be cited as persuasive authority” — but as evidence of what practitioners were doing, they are worth more than a treatise.
In Quest v. Rekieta, No. A23-1337 (Minn. App. May 20, 2024), a Colorado plaintiff sued a Minnesota lawyer in Minnesota for defamation and emotional distress. The defendant moved to dismiss under Colorado’s anti-SLAPP statute and lost on choice of law. The court of appeals worked the five-factor analysis and put the point flatly: both states have anti-SLAPP laws, but after Leiendecker “no such motion currently exists under Minnesota law,” so the choice created a real conflict. Slip op. at 4. On the governmental-interest factor the court wrote that “in the seven years since the supreme court struck down Minnesota’s anti-SLAPP statute in Leiendecker, the legislature has not amended Minnesota Statutes section 554.02 to address its constitutional infirmity,” and concluded that “Minnesota has therefore made clear that its interest in protecting a litigant’s right to a civil jury trial prevails over its interest in maintaining an anti-SLAPP statute, as applied to tort claims at law.” Slip op. at 13–14. Applying Colorado’s standard, the court said, “would conflict with the animating reasoning of Leiendecker.” Slip op. at 16.
The opinion issued on May 20, 2024. The governor signed UPEPA four days later. A footnote records that after oral argument both parties wrote in about the pending bill, and the court declined to consider either letter under Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 128.05 — legislation “that is not yet enacted” is not a “pertinent and significant authorit[y].” Slip op. at 14 n.5. I have rarely seen a decision overtaken so precisely.
Two weeks after that — nine days after UPEPA took effect, on an appeal from a 2023 order in a case filed in September 2021 — the traffic ran the other way in Sugarman v. Muddy Waters Capital, LLC, No. A23-1906 (Minn. App. June 3, 2024). California plaintiffs sued in Hennepin County for defamation. The defendants moved to dismiss on forum non conveniens, and the plaintiffs asked that any transfer to California be conditioned on the defendants’ agreement not to invoke California’s anti-SLAPP statute. The district court refused, reasoning that “[s]ince California’s anti-SLAPP statute does not have the same constitutional infirmities as Minnesota’s anti-SLAPP statute, the potential applicability of California’s anti-SLAPP statute does not deprive [appellants] of an effective remedy or render California an inadequate forum.” Slip op. at 7. The court of appeals affirmed, adding that the plaintiffs “would seem to be pursuing this action in Minnesota only because they see it as a more legally advantageous venue.” Slip op. at 9–10.
That is what a state without an anti-SLAPP law is: a destination. Minnesota was one for seven years, and its own courts said so out loud.
The chapter as it stands, counted rather than assumed
I pulled every section number in chapter 554 individually rather than trusting a range. Here is the count. Seven sections are repealed — 554.01, .02, .03, .04, .045, .05, and .06, all struck by 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 123, art. 18, § 16. Fourteen are live: 554.07 through 554.20. There is no § 554.21; the Revisor returns a 404. Every live section’s History line reads 2024 c 123 art 18 and nothing else, so no part of UPEPA has been amended since the day it took effect, and the conforming-changes legislation the revisor was instructed to prepare for the 2025 session, id. art. 18, § 15, did not touch chapter 554 itself.
The live sections are short and do one job each: short title (554.07), scope and exclusions (554.08), the special motion (554.09), the stay (554.10), the hearing clock (554.11), the evidentiary universe (554.12), the merits standard (554.13), the ruling clock (554.14), appeal (554.15), fees (554.16), broad construction (554.17), uniformity (554.18), the savings clause (554.19), and non-waiver (554.20).
Notice the last one. Section 554.07 defines the act as “sections 554.07 to 554.19.” So does § 554.08, and § 554.13, and § 554.17, and the savings clause itself. Section 554.20 sits outside every one of those internal references — it is codified in the chapter but excluded from the act’s own definition of itself. The court of appeals has not settled on how to cite the thing: Cook v. Trimble names the act as “Minn. Stat. §§ 554.07-.19 (2024),” while Quinlan v. Fraser and Anderson v. Anderson each cite it through .20. Nothing turns on it yet. It is the kind of loose thread that eventually gets pulled.
The two remedies the legislature did not bring back
This is the part that gets missed, and it is the part I would want a client to hear first.
The 1994 chapter did more than dismiss cases. Old § 554.04 gave a prevailing movant mandatory fees and a damages claim:
If a motion under this chapter is granted and the moving party demonstrates that the respondent brought the cause of action in the underlying lawsuit for the purpose of harassment, to inhibit the moving party’s public participation, to interfere with the moving party’s exercise of protected constitutional rights, or otherwise wrongfully injure the moving party, the court shall award the moving party actual damages. The court may award the moving party punitive damages under section 549.20. A motion to amend the pleadings under section 549.191 is not required under this section, but the claim for punitive damages must meet all other requirements of section 549.191.
Minn. Stat. 2022, § 554.04, subd. 2(b). Read that last sentence again. The old statute gave an anti-SLAPP movant a free pass around the § 549.191 motion for permission to plead punitive damages — one of the very few places in Minnesota law where the legislature waived that gate.
And old § 554.045, added in 1997, let a person sued in federal court bring an action in state district court against the party who filed it: on a showing that the federal claim was brought “for the purpose of harassment, to inhibit the person’s public participation, to interfere with the person’s exercise of protected constitutional rights, or otherwise wrongfully injure the person,” the state court “shall award the person actual damages and reasonable attorney fees and costs,” and “may award the person punitive damages under section 549.20.”
Both are gone. I read all fourteen live sections looking for an analogue and there is none. The entire monetary content of UPEPA is § 554.16:
On a motion under section 554.09, the court shall award court costs, reasonable attorney fees, and reasonable litigation expenses related to the motion:
(1) to the moving party if the moving party prevails on the motion; or
(2) to the responding party if the responding party prevails on the motion and the court finds that the motion was frivolous or filed solely with intent to delay the proceeding.
Costs, fees, and expenses related to the motion — not to the case, and not to the injury. There is no actual-damages remedy, no punitive-damages remedy, and no cause of action against a SLAPP filer anywhere in the act.
That is a real trade, and it should change how a defendant thinks about strategy. Under the old chapter, a defendant with a strong immunity claim had an offensive weapon. Under UPEPA the defendant has a fast exit and a fee award sized to the motion. If the client’s actual injury from being sued is larger than the motion practice — lost contracts, a wrecked reputation, a year of distraction — UPEPA will not compensate it, and the claim to look at is malicious prosecution or abuse of process, pleaded on its own elements and litigated on its own timeline. That is not a hypothetical detour. As the supreme court noted in Stengrim, “SLAPP suits generally come in the form of tort claims, such as defamation, interference with contract, abuse of process and malicious prosecution, among others.” 784 N.W.2d at 838 n.3. Note the second item on that list. A tortious interference claim in Minnesota can carry the attorney fees of an underlying lawsuit as damages — which makes it both an attractive thing to plead against a critic and an expensive thing to be on the receiving end of.
Sixty days, one stay, and a fee shift that runs one direction
The mechanics are simple enough to fit in a page, and the deadlines are the part clients get wrong. Our defamation guide walks the same machinery from inside a libel case; what follows is the deadline-and-exposure version, including the provisions that do not usually make the summaries.
The clock. Section 554.09 allows the motion “[n]ot later than 60 days after a party is served with a complaint, crossclaim, counterclaim, third-party claim, or other pleading that asserts a cause of action to which sections 554.07 to 554.19 apply, or at a later time on a showing of good cause . . . .” Sixty days is generous next to the 21 days Minn. R. Civ. P. 12.01 gives to answer — but the answer deadline does not move because a UPEPA motion is available, and the good-cause escape hatch is not something I would plan around.
The stay. On filing, § 554.10(a)(1) provides that “all other proceedings between the moving party and responding party, including discovery and a pending hearing or motion, are stayed.” It runs until the order issues and the 30-day appeal window under § 554.15 expires, § 554.10(b), and it survives into an appeal, § 554.10(c). The only discovery available is what a party shows is “necessary to establish whether a party has satisfied or failed to satisfy a burden under section 554.13, paragraph (a),” and is “not reasonably available unless discovery is allowed.” § 554.10(d). A fee motion under § 554.16 is not subject to the stay at all, § 554.10(e), and during the stay the court “for good cause may hear and rule on” a motion for a special or preliminary injunction “to protect against an imminent threat to public health or safety,” § 554.10(g)(2).
The calendar. Hearing within 60 days of filing, § 554.11(a); ruling within 60 days of the hearing, § 554.14. A district court that allows discovery gets 60 days from that order. § 554.11(b).
The standard. Section 554.13(a) directs that the court “shall dismiss with prejudice” if the movant establishes the act applies under § 554.08(b), the respondent fails to establish an exclusion under § 554.08(c), and either the respondent “fails to establish a prima facie case as to each essential element of the cause of action,” § 554.13(a)(3)(i), or the movant establishes a Rule 12.02(e) or Rule 56 ground, § 554.13(a)(3)(ii). Dismissal is with prejudice. There is no do-over.
The evidence. Section 554.12 tells the court to consider the pleadings, the motion, the response, “and any evidence that could be considered in ruling on a motion for summary judgment under Minnesota Rules of Civil Procedure 56.03.” That cross-reference is slightly off its target. After the July 1, 2018 restyling, Rule 56.03 is captioned “Procedures” and governs how a party supports or disputes a fact; the summary-judgment standard — “no genuine issue as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law” — now lives in Rule 56.01. The courts have read the statute sensibly, as incorporating the Rule 56 apparatus rather than one subdivision of it, but a litigant arguing about what the district court may look at should know exactly which subdivision the legislature named.
The fees. The § 554.16 asymmetry is the single most consequential sentence in the act for a plaintiff’s lawyer. A movant who prevails gets fees as of right. A respondent who defeats the motion gets nothing unless the court also finds the motion “frivolous or filed solely with intent to delay.” Worse for a plaintiff who wants out: dismissing voluntarily does not close the exposure. A dismissal without prejudice “does not affect a moving party’s right to obtain a ruling on the motion and seek costs, attorney fees, and expenses under section 554.16,” § 554.13(b), and a dismissal with prejudice “establishes for the purpose of section 554.16 that the moving party prevailed on the motion,” § 554.13(c). Once a UPEPA motion is on file, walking away is a concession, not an escape.
Who gets the immediate appeal, and who does not
Section 554.15 is one sentence and it only points one way:
A moving party may appeal as a matter of right from an order denying, in whole or in part, a motion under section 554.09. The appeal must be filed not later than 30 days after entry of the order.
The defendant whose motion is denied appeals immediately. The plaintiff whose claim is dismissed has no corresponding right, and the fallback route is treacherous. In Quinlan v. Fraser, No. A25-1084 (Minn. App. Aug. 25, 2025), a self-represented plaintiff faced a UPEPA motion aimed at six of his eight claims, lost the defamation claim outright and parts of several others, and appealed after the district court entered a partial judgment carrying “no just reason for delay” language that nobody had asked for. The court of appeals dismissed the appeal, holding as a syllabus point that “[a] district court abuses its discretion in certifying entry of a final partial judgment under Minn. R. Civ. P. 54.02 when the district court fails to provide reasons for the certification and the basis for the certification is not otherwise apparent from the record.” Slip op. at 1. The court added that the certification language appeared to have been “added based on a mistaken belief that such language is required every time a partial judgment of dismissal is entered.” Slip op. at 6.
A plaintiff who loses part of a case to UPEPA and wants review now must ask the district court for a reasoned Rule 54.02 certification, on the record, and be prepared to defend it. Boilerplate will not carry it.
Is UPEPA itself constitutional?
The court of appeals says yes, and the Minnesota Supreme Court has not spoken.
In Anderson v. Anderson, No. A25-1075 (Minn. App. Apr. 27, 2026), the plaintiff argued that UPEPA’s burden shift recreates the Leiendecker defect. She served notice of the constitutional challenge under Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 144, and the attorney general intervened to defend the statute. The court rejected the challenge on both of Leiendecker’s grounds. First: “Unlike Minnesota’s previous anti-SLAPP statute, UPEPA does not require district courts to make factual findings,” because it “merely ‘provides an accelerated procedure for obtaining rulings under standards articulated in Minn. R. Civ. P. 12.02(e) and 56,’” and courts do not find facts at either stage. Slip op. at 19 (quoting Cook v. Trimble, 22 N.W.3d 196, 204 (Minn. App. 2025)). Second: “the UPEPA framework does not require the nonmoving party to meet a higher burden of proof before trial as it would have to meet at trial,” because a prima facie showing is already baked into the Rule 12 and Rule 56 standards. Slip op. at 20. The court held UPEPA constitutional as applied and leaned on a Kentucky decision construing the same uniform act, as § 554.18 and Minn. Stat. § 645.22 invite: “Laws uniform with those of other states shall be interpreted and construed to effect their general purpose to make uniform the laws of those states which enact them.”
That reasoning is sound as far as it goes, and it is exactly the answer Chief Justice Gildea’s dissent anticipated would have to be given. But two cautions belong on it.
The first is that the Anderson holding, like Leiendecker’s, is as applied. The court said UPEPA “as applied by the district court” is constitutional. Slip op. at 20. A district court that actually resolves a disputed fact on a UPEPA motion — and the shape of these motions invites it — has not been blessed by anyone.
The second is uniformity. Section 554.18 and § 645.22 push Minnesota courts toward the interpretations of other UPEPA states, and § 554.17 commands that the act “must be broadly construed and applied to protect the exercise of the right of freedom of speech and of the press, the right to assemble and petition, and the right of association, guaranteed by the United States Constitution or Minnesota Constitution.” But Minnesota’s § 554.08(c) is not the uniform text. It removes twelve numbered categories from the act’s reach, and several of those clauses bundle whole subject areas. Clause (9) alone reaches a cause of action “brought under chapters 517 to 519A; or counterclaims based on a criminal no-contact order pursuant to section 629.72 or 629.75; for or based on an antiharassment order or a sexual assault protection order under section 518B.01; or for or based on a vulnerable adult protection order for crimes against the vulnerable adult under sections 609.232, 609.2325, 609.233, 609.2335, and 609.234.” Clause (10) covers chapters 175, 177, 178, 179, and 179A, plus negligent supervision, retention, or infliction of emotional distress “unless the claims involve damage to reputation,” wrongful discharge in violation of public policy, whistleblowing, and enforcement of employee rights under civil service, collective bargaining, or handbooks and policies. Add the exclusions for real-property claims, bodily-injury claims, insurance claims, common-law fraud, consumer protection under chapters 325F and 325G, and any claim brought under federal law, and a great deal of Minnesota litigation is simply outside the act. Telling courts to promote uniformity in a statute this heavily localized is an instruction with limits.
Clause (9) is also worth reading twice for a different reason. It excludes an action “for or based on an antiharassment order or a sexual assault protection order under section 518B.01” — but § 518B.01 is the Domestic Abuse Act, and Minnesota’s harassment restraining order lives at § 609.748. Whether the clause reaches a § 609.748 petition is an open question the appellate courts have not answered, and I would not assume the answer either way in front of a district court.
As of this writing the supreme court has taken two of these cases and decided neither. Review was granted in Cook v. Trimble on August 12, 2025, and in Paragon Restorations, LLC v. Robinet Productions, LLC, 31 N.W.3d 218 (Minn. App. 2025), on March 25, 2026. I checked the Minnesota Judicial Branch’s own slip-opinion archive day by day for both docket numbers through this article’s date and found no opinion in either. Every published UPEPA authority in Minnesota is a court of appeals decision, and two of the most-cited are under review.
If UPEPA does not reach your case
Given § 554.08(c), it very often will not. That is when the older defenses matter, and none of them were touched by anything that happened in 2017 or 2024.
The judicial-proceedings privilege is absolute for statements by a judge, judicial officer, attorney, or witness, made at a judicial or quasi-judicial proceeding, and relevant to the subject matter of the litigation. It is also narrower than lawyers assume. Cook v. Trimble held as a syllabus point that “[s]tatements made by an attorney to the media regarding a lawsuit do not generally fall within the protections of the judicial-proceedings privilege.” The same appellants’ statements in a 2023 court filing were absolutely privileged. Filing protects. The press release does not.
The fair-and-accurate-reporting privilege protects a report of a public proceeding. In Moreno v. Crookston Times Printing Co., 610 N.W.2d 321 (Minn. 2000) (No. C6-98-2421), the supreme court held that the privilege “extends to protect the accurate and complete report or a fair abridgment of events that are part of the regular business of a city council meeting,” and that it “will not be defeated by a showing of common law malice, but is defeated by a showing that the report is not a fair and accurate report of that proceeding.” Id. at 333. The privilege is broad in what it forgives and narrow in what it covers: add material from outside the proceeding that conveys a defamatory impression or impugns anyone’s veracity, and “[t]he entire report then would be subject to evaluation as any other allegedly defamatory statement.” Id. at 332–33.
Rules 12.02(e) and 56 still do most of the work in this state, and they now do it on a normal schedule instead of an expedited one. A defamation claim that fails on falsity, on opinion, on the absence of provable defamatory meaning, or on fault does not need a special statute — see our Minnesota defamation guide for how those elements actually get litigated under UPEPA and outside it, and the invasion of privacy piece for the theory that survives when the statement is true.
Section 549.211 and Rule 11 reach the case UPEPA cannot: a claim presented “for any improper purpose, such as to harass or to cause unnecessary delay or needless increase in the cost of litigation.” Minn. Stat. § 549.211, subd. 2(1). The motion must be served and then held for 21 days before it may be filed, subd. 4(a), and the sanction is limited to what suffices to deter, subd. 5(a). It is a slower and smaller remedy than a fee award under § 554.16 — but it is available in the excluded categories where UPEPA is not. We walk through the timing in Rule 11 and the § 549.211 safe harbor.
Section 554.20 preserves all of it: “A special motion for expedited relief under sections 554.07 to 554.19 is not meant to waive a defense or preclude the filing of another pleading or motion regarding the cause of action.” Bringing the motion costs you nothing else you had.
One last practical note for the other side of the caption. Speech-based disputes frequently arrive as a petition rather than a complaint, and a harassment restraining order built on someone’s words is a different proceeding with different standards. Clause (9) of § 554.08(c) pulls a range of family and protective-order matters out of UPEPA — but as noted above, the clause names § 518B.01 rather than the harassment-restraining-order statute at § 609.748, so whether the § 554.16 fee exposure follows a respondent into an HRO hearing is not settled. Brief it; do not assume it.
Where Madgett Law, LLC fits
Madgett Law, LLC handles speech-based disputes in Minnesota state and federal court on both sides of the caption. That work starts with three questions and, in my experience, ends with them too: when was the cause of action asserted, does § 554.08(c) put the claim outside the act, and can the client absorb a mandatory fee award if the motion goes the wrong way. We evaluate demand letters before a complaint gets filed, bring and defend special motions for expedited relief within the 60-day window, and litigate the older privileges when UPEPA does not reach the claim. If you have been sued over something you said, published, or reported to a government body — or you are deciding whether to sue — call 612-470-6529 or send us a message.
Sources: Minn. Stat. § 554.07 (short title; act defined as §§ 554.07 to 554.19); § 554.08(b)(1)–(3) (scope), (c)(1)–(12) (exclusions, including clause (9) family/protective-order matters and clause (10) employment and labor matters), (d)(1)–(2) (carve-back); § 554.09 (60-day window; good-cause extension); § 554.10(a)(1), (b), (c), (d), (e), (g)(2) (automatic stay; duration; stay on appeal; limited discovery; fee motions exempt; public-health injunction exception); § 554.11(a)–(b) (hearing within 60 days); § 554.12 (evidence considerable under Minn. R. Civ. P. 56.03); § 554.13(a)(1)–(3), (b), (c) (three-step standard; dismissal with prejudice; effect of voluntary dismissal on fee exposure); § 554.14 (ruling within 60 days); § 554.15 (moving party’s appeal of right; 30 days from entry); § 554.16(1)–(2) (mandatory costs, fees, and expenses related to the motion to a prevailing movant; to a respondent only on a frivolousness or delay finding); § 554.17 (broad construction); § 554.18 (uniformity); § 554.19 (savings clause; causes of action asserted before May 25, 2024); § 554.20 (no waiver of other pleadings or defenses). Minn. Stat. 2022, § 554.01, subds. 3, 6 (repealed definitions); § 554.02, subd. 2(2)–(3) (repealed procedure; clauses quoted); § 554.03 (repealed substantive immunity); § 554.04, subds. 1–2 (repealed fees and actual/punitive damages, with the § 549.191 motion expressly excused); § 554.045 (repealed state-court action over a federal-court SLAPP); §§ 554.05, .06 (repealed savings and liberal-construction provisions). 2024 Minn. Laws ch. 123 (H.F. 5216), art. 18, §§ 1–14 (enacting UPEPA at §§ 554.07–554.20), § 15 (revisor instruction), § 16 (repealing Minn. Stat. 2022, §§ 554.01, .02, .03, .04, .045, .05, .06), § 17 (effective the day following final enactment; applies to a civil action pending on or commenced on or after that date); session-law record of presentment May 22, 2024 and signature May 24, 2024, 9:15 a.m. Minn. Stat. § 645.02 (default effective dates, displaced here by art. 18, § 17); § 645.20 (severability and its two exceptions); § 645.22 (construction of uniform laws); § 549.211, subds. 2(1), 4(a), 5(a) (improper-purpose certification; 21-day safe harbor; sanction limited to deterrence). Minn. Const. art. I, § 4 (jury-trial right), as quoted in Leiendecker, 895 N.W.2d at 634. Minn. R. Civ. P. 12.01 (21 days to answer), 12.02(e), 54.02, 56.01 (summary-judgment standard), 56.03 (procedures, as restyled effective July 1, 2018). Minn. R. Civ. App. P. 136.01, subd. 1(c) (nonprecedential opinions are not binding but may be cited as persuasive authority); 144 (notice of constitutional challenge to the attorney general). Leiendecker v. Asian Women United of Minnesota, 895 N.W.2d 623, 630–31 n.2, 632–33, 634–38, 636 n.5, 638–40 (Minn. 2017) (No. A16-0360) (630–31 n.2: facial-challenge petition denied; 632–33: ripeness of the constitutional claim; 634: art. I, § 4; 635: usurping the jury’s role; 636: the two defects and, at n.5, constitutional-rights claims reserved; 637: substantive immunities unaffected and the Legislature-may-immunize sentence; 638: nonseverability and holding; 638–40: Gildea, C.J., dissenting). Leiendecker v. Asian Women United of Minnesota, 848 N.W.2d 224, 231, 232, 233 (Minn. 2014) (Nos. A12-1978, A12-2015) (231: burden to persuade the trier of fact and incompatibility with the summary-judgment standard; 232: jury-trial argument disclaimed; 233: holding). Middle-Snake-Tamarac Rivers Watershed District v. Stengrim, 784 N.W.2d 834, 838 n.3, 839, 842–43 n.9 (Minn. 2010) (No. A08-825) (838 n.3: SLAPP suits generally come as tort claims including defamation, interference with contract, abuse of process, and malicious prosecution; 839: first supreme court construction of the chapter and “unique procedural framework”; 842–43 n.9: constitutional concerns flagged). Moreno v. Crookston Times Printing Co., 610 N.W.2d 321, 332, 333, 334 (Minn. 2000) (No. C6-98-2421) (332: added non-proceeding material defeats the privilege; 333: holding on city council meetings and common-law malice; 334: summary). Cook v. Trimble, 22 N.W.3d 196, 204 (Minn. App. May 5, 2025) (No. A24-1486), rev. granted (Minn. Aug. 12, 2025) (syllabus 1: de novo review; syllabus 2: attorney statements to the media; 204: accelerated procedure under Rule 12.02(e) and Rule 56 standards). Anderson v. Anderson, No. A25-1075 (Minn. App. Apr. 27, 2026) (slip op. at 1–2, 6–7, 19–20) (syllabus: report to a licensing board is a communication in a governmental proceeding under § 554.08(b)(1); rule 144 notice and attorney general intervention; UPEPA constitutional as applied). Paragon Restorations, LLC v. Robinet Productions, LLC, 31 N.W.3d 218 (Minn. App. Dec. 29, 2025) (No. A25-0826), rev. granted (Minn. Mar. 25, 2026). Quinlan v. Fraser, No. A25-1084 (Minn. App. Aug. 25, 2025) (slip op. at 1, 3 n.3, 6, 8) (Rule 54.02 certification of a UPEPA partial dismissal; appeal dismissed). Quest v. Rekieta, No. A23-1337 (Minn. App. May 20, 2024) (nonprecedential) (slip op. at 4, 13–14, 14 n.5, 16) (Colorado anti-SLAPP statute not applied in a Minnesota tort action). Sugarman v. Muddy Waters Capital, LLC, No. A23-1906 (Minn. App. June 3, 2024) (nonprecedential) (slip op. at 3, 7, 9–10) (2021 filing date and procedural history; forum non conveniens dismissal to California; anti-SLAPP condition refused; forum shopping). This article is general legal information about Minnesota law. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney–client relationship, and no outcome is promised or implied.