Filing clocks, arbitration, fees, and getting through the courthouse door.
Minn. Stat. § 626.89 is written for officers under investigation. For a civil plaintiff, it decides what investigative material has to exist — and a 2026 amendment just widened it.
Read →Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders is overstated in both directions. Here is the precise scope of the intake-search rule, the questions the Court expressly reserved, and what the Eighth Circuit still treats as actionable.
Read →State law creates property interests; the Constitution does not. Roth, Perry, Loudermill, and Mathews v. Eldridge, applied to Minnesota public employment, licenses, and benefits.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 572B.04 lists what a pre-dispute arbitration clause may not take away: the § 572B.16 right to a lawyer, the § 572B.12 neutral-arbitrator disclosures, and the § 572B.07 and § 572B.23 court role. What the arbitrator may award you, under § 572B.21, is on neither list.
Read →For a Fourth Amendment false arrest claim, probable cause is a complete defense — and in the Eighth Circuit, even arguable probable cause ends it. The Supreme Court has twice reshaped the malicious prosecution claim since 2022, and the Eighth Circuit added a requirement in 2025.
Read →A constitutional violation is not priced by the importance of the right. Carey, Stachura, Smith v. Wade, and City of Newport set what a § 1983 plaintiff can actually recover — and from whom.
Read →Can a bank use the arbitration clause in an account you did open to force arbitration of claims about an account you never opened? Minnesota has a rule about contracts that never existed — and it does not answer this question.
Read →Nieves v. Bartlett requires a retaliatory-arrest plaintiff to plead and prove the absence of probable cause, with one narrow exception. In the Eighth Circuit the bar is higher still — and Minnesota's obstruction statute is where the fight actually happens.
Read →Exhaustion, the physical-injury rule, the fee cap, and three strikes. The PLRA decides prisoner cases before anyone reaches the constitutional question — here is how each piece works.
Read →Why a Minnesota wrongful-conviction damages case is decided on the prosecutorial-investigative line and the Eighth Circuit's bad-faith rule, not on the Brady violation itself.
Read →Wells Fargo opened accounts its customers never authorized — and enforced the arbitration clauses in the accounts they did authorize. How the maneuver worked, and where a Minnesotan's version of it would be decided.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 590.11 and the Incarceration and Exoneration Remedies Act give an exonerated Minnesotan a damages route that does not depend on proving anyone violated the Constitution.
Read →Section 1983 creates no rights — it enforces them. Who counts as a 'person,' why official-capacity and individual-capacity suits are different cases, and the Eighth Circuit pleading rule that has ended Minnesota claims on a caption.
Read →Damages caps, jury rights, fee shifting, exhaustion, and the election-of-remedies provisions in Minn. Stat. §§ 363A.04, 363A.07, and 363A.33 — the tradeoffs behind choosing a statute, not a calendar.
Read →Maslowski v. Prospect Funding Partners abolished champerty in 2020 and, in 2023, held that a litigation financing agreement is not subject to Minn. Stat. § 334.01's usury cap. What survives is unconscionability — a doctrine that lives entirely in the document.
Read →Garner set the constitutional floor for shooting a fleeing suspect. Minn. Stat. § 609.066, subd. 2(a)(2) sits above it — and the felony is only half the test.
Read →A Minnesota consumer lawyer on three quiet forces—tougher pleading rules, buried class-action waivers, and plain cost—that are shutting ordinary people out of the courts.
Read →42 U.S.C. § 1988 lets a prevailing civil rights plaintiff recover fees from the defendant. Who counts as prevailing, how the lodestar works, and the traps — Buckhannon, nominal damages, Rule 68, and fee waivers in settlement.
Read →A private plaintiff under ADA Title III gets injunctive relief and fees, not money. Minn. Stat. § 363A.11 reaches damages — but § 363A.331 requires a pre-suit notice, with at least 60 days to respond, before counsel files an architectural-barrier case.
Read →In United States v. Hemani, the Supreme Court held that prosecuting a marijuana user for keeping a gun at home violated the Second Amendment. Minnesota's firearms statute already carved out adult-use and medical cannabis. The two systems still do not line up.
Read →A § 1983 claim and a Minnesota battery claim arising from the same arrest run on different immunities, different damages ceilings, and different clocks. Pleading only one is a decision, and it is usually made by accident.
Read →Title II of the ADA reaches police departments, and the Eighth Circuit has applied it to the transport of a disabled arrestee. Whether it reaches the arrest itself is still open — the Supreme Court declined to answer.
Read →In Flowers Foods v. Brock, a unanimous Court held that last-mile drivers moving goods that traveled interstate are exempt from the Federal Arbitration Act — even if the driver never leaves the state. A rare decision that opens the courthouse door.
Read →Minnesota's 2020 restraint limits are conditional, not flat bans — they turn on whether deadly force would be authorized. Plus the warrior-style training prohibition.
Read →Minn. Stat. ch. 572B, § 337.10, subd. 1, and § 181.988, subd. 3 each tell Minnesota parties something about where and whether they must arbitrate. Two of the three name arbitration expressly — which is precisely the feature the Federal Arbitration Act treats with suspicion.
Read →Section 1983 has no limitations period of its own. In Minnesota the borrowed period is six years, and the Eighth Circuit has said so in a published opinion. The citation trail behind that answer is messier than the answer.
Read →Section 1983 has no respondeat superior. A Minnesota city answers only for its own policy or custom, and the Eighth Circuit's custom test asks for a pattern of similar misconduct, not a single incident.
Read →When a Minnesota notice requirement is missed, the sanction is usually loss of the entire right: no lien, no claim, a void deed, a dismissed case. But the exceptions are not random — the cure goes to the party with less leverage.
Read →Qualified immunity is not a defense on the merits — it is a rule about how specific the prior case law has to be. In the Eighth Circuit, that usually means finding a case with facts close to yours.
Read →The Federal Arbitration Act was written to help merchants settle commercial disputes. Four decades of Supreme Court decisions turned it into a tool that pushes consumers out of court.
Read →The Fourth Amendment asks whether force was objectively reasonable. Minnesota's statute asks whether it was necessary. One incident, two standards, two different answers.
Read →Minnesota's Legislature wrote a deadly-force rule stricter than the federal constitutional floor — necessity plus a three-part threat test. Here is what it says and where it bites.
Read →In Enbridge Energy, LP v. Nessel, a unanimous Court held the 30-day removal deadline cannot be equitably tolled. Minnesota's Attorney General was on the winning side, and 337 miles of Enbridge pipeline run through this state.
Read →In Maslowski v. Prospect Funding Partners, the Minnesota Supreme Court abolished the common-law prohibition against champerty. Third-party litigation funding is enforceable in Minnesota. The protections that remain are contract law and unconscionability.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 8.31, subd. 3a gives any person injured by a violation of Minnesota's consumer protection statutes a civil action for damages, costs of investigation, and reasonable attorney's fees. It is the most underused remedy in Minnesota consumer law.
Read →In Postal Service v. Konan, a 5–4 Court held the FTCA's postal exception bars claims for intentional nondelivery. Minnesota law starts foreclosure clocks, surplus-claim clocks, and response deadlines from the moment something is mailed.
Read →In Hain Celestial Group v. Palmquist, a unanimous Court held that erroneously dismissing a non-diverse defendant after removal does not cure the jurisdictional defect. A federal jury trial and a defense judgment were vacated for want of jurisdiction.
Read →In Berk v. Choy, the Supreme Court held that a state affidavit-of-merit requirement does not apply in federal court. Minnesota has two of them — and Minnesota's Attorney General signed the brief urging the Court to rule the other way.
Read →In Coney Island Auto Parts v. Burton, the Court held that a motion attacking a void judgment must still be filed within a reasonable time. In Minnesota, where 82% of debt-collection cases in district court end in default, that is not an academic rule.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 541.05 gives six years for most contract and tort claims — but strict product liability gets four, and a long list of claims run on much shorter clocks. The most expensive mistake in civil litigation is arriving late.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 544.42 and § 145.682 require expert affidavits in professional and malpractice cases, and both make dismissal with prejudice mandatory. Neither deadline runs from a court filing, and the two statutes are not the twins they look like.
Read →Under Minn. Stat. § 549.09, subd. 1(b), the party whose written settlement offer lands closer to the verdict controls who gets preverdict interest and on what amount — and subd. 1(c) sets a flat ten percent above $50,000.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 549.191 forbids a complaint from seeking punitive damages and requires a motion, affidavits, and a prima facie showing first. Read with § 549.20 and § 544.36, it means a Minnesota complaint may not say what the case is worth.
Read →A deadline running from a filing is a calendar entry. A deadline running from 'the last item of work,' 'first furnished,' or 'should have been discovered' is a fact question — and in Minnesota those are the ones that forfeit rights.
Read →Minnesota shifts attorney fees in some claims, refuses to in others, and in one instance caps the fee at $5. Read together — § 8.31, § 325F.70, § 181.171, § 337.10, § 325C.04, § 302A.461 — the pattern is not about the seriousness of the wrong.
Read →Read § 322C.0110, § 337.02, § 337.05, § 337.10, § 336.9-602, § 325E.61, and § 504B.365 together and a pattern appears: Minnesota's non-waivable core is not substance. It is access, information, and forum.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 609.748 defines harassment to include repeated intrusive or unwanted acts 'regardless of the relationship between the actor and the intended target' — the opposite of the order for protection under Minn. Stat. § 518B.01, which begins and ends with relationship.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 518A.34 sets a six-step computation, § 518A.35 supplies the guideline table, and § 518A.36 adjusts for parenting time by cubing each parent's annual overnights. Parenting time and imputed income under § 518A.32 are where Minnesota support cases are actually fought.
Read →Minn. Stat. § 491A.01 sets the conciliation court limit at $20,000 — but only $4,000 for consumer credit transactions, and eleven categories of claim are excluded outright. The 21-day removal window is where most of the real damage happens.
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