Minnesota state statutes are the compiled general and permanent laws of Minnesota, organized by chapter and section and published by the Office of the Revisor of Statutes. The full text is free to read online at the Revisor’s website, which is updated each year after the Legislature adjourns.1Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Statutes Info You can search by citation, by keyword, or through an alphabetical topic index, and most people find what they need in a few minutes once they understand how the numbering works.
How Citations Like 609.52 Are Built
Minnesota groups its laws into numbered Chapters by subject. Chapter 609 is the Criminal Code.2Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code Chapter 609 – Criminal Code Chapter 171 covers drivers’ licenses.3Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code Chapter 171 – Drivers Licenses and Training Schools Chapter 340A covers liquor.
Within each chapter, individual provisions carry a Section number after a decimal. The theft statute is 609.52, meaning Chapter 609, Section 52.4Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code 609.52 – Theft Longer sections split into numbered Subdivisions that handle narrower points. So a full citation might read 609.52, subd. 2, which tells you exactly which paragraph of which section of which chapter to open.
Finding a Statute on the Revisor’s Website
The Revisor offers three ways in, and the right one depends on what you already know.
Find by Number
If you have a citation from a court document, form, or lawyer’s letter, type the chapter and section (for example, 340A.404) and you land on that provision.5Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code 340A.404 – Special Liquor Licenses This is the fastest route.
Search by Keyword
Keyword search runs across the full text of the statutes. Narrow phrases outperform broad ones: “residential landlord security deposit” returns something useful; “renting” does not. Put an exact phrase in quotation marks to require it word-for-word. Join terms with AND to require both, or OR to accept either.
Statutes by Topic
The alphabetical index lists thousands of subjects and points to the governing chapter and section. It rescues you when the Legislature’s word for something is not the word you would use. A reader looking up neighbor noise, for instance, will find the relevant law filed under “nuisance.”
What You Are Looking At on the Page
A statute entry has several parts, and only some of them are the law.
Headnotes
The bold title above each section and subdivision is a headnote. It is not part of the law. Section 645.49 calls headnotes “mere catchwords to indicate the contents of the section” with no legal authority.6Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code 645.49 – Headnotes Not Part of Law Use them to orient yourself, not to decide what the statute requires.
History Notes
Below the text sits a chronological list of every session that enacted or amended the provision, keyed to the session law chapter and year. The Revisor is required to place a source note after each section showing the session law it came from.7Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code Chapter 3C – Revisor of Statutes That trail tells you when each change took effect, which matters when a dispute turns on the version of the law in force at a particular time.
Cross-References
Statutes point at other statutes all the time. A penalty in Chapter 609 may depend on a license defined in Chapter 171; a tax rule may import definitions from somewhere else entirely. Follow the links. Reading one section in isolation is one of the easier ways to misread the law.
What the Free Site Does Not Include
The Revisor’s site gives you the statutory text, history, and cross-references. It does not include case annotations or editorial commentary. Those appear in commercial publications such as West’s Minnesota Statutes Annotated, available through paid legal databases or in print at law libraries. If you need to know how Minnesota courts have actually applied a provision, you will need one of those sources.
Statutes, Session Laws, and Minnesota Rules
Three different publications make up Minnesota’s written law, and mixing them up is a common research mistake.
- Minnesota Statutes are the consolidated, currently-in-force compilation of all general and permanent laws. When new legislation passes, the Revisor folds the changes in and takes out whatever was repealed. This is what you want when you need to know what the law says now.7Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code Chapter 3C – Revisor of Statutes
- Laws of Minnesota, or session laws, are the annual compilation of every act the Legislature passed that year, printed in the order of enactment. They include appropriations, proposed constitutional amendments, local laws, and effective-date language that never gets rolled into the compiled statutes. Use session laws for legislative history, not for the current rule.8Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Laws Info
- Minnesota Rules are administrative regulations adopted by state agencies to carry out the statutes they enforce. A statute may require safe workplaces; a rule spells out specific equipment. Rules carry the force of law but come from executive agencies, not the Legislature.9Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Statutes – Revisor Publications
Start with the compiled statutes. Go to session laws when you need the history behind a change, and check Minnesota Rules when the statute hands detailed requirements to an agency.
How Courts Read Statutes
Chapter 645 contains the rules courts follow when they interpret Minnesota law, and those rules shape how you should read a statute yourself.
If the words of a law are clear and unambiguous as applied to the situation, courts enforce the plain text and do not look past it.10Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code Chapter 645 – Interpretation of Statutes and Rules – Section 645.16 Words carry their common, everyday meaning unless the statute defines them or they have a settled technical meaning.11Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code 645.08 – Canons of Construction
When the text is ambiguous, courts look to legislative intent. Section 645.16 lists eight factors a court may weigh, including the problem the law was meant to address, the circumstances of enactment, the former version of the law, the consequences of each possible reading, and the legislative history.10Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code Chapter 645 – Interpretation of Statutes and Rules – Section 645.16 For most everyday questions, the plain text answers you. Edge cases send you into the legislative record.
Chapter 645 also sets default grammar rules that apply across the statutes unless a particular provision clearly departs from them. The singular includes the plural and the plural includes the singular. Words of one gender include the others. General words that follow a specific list are read as limited by the specific ones.11Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes. Minnesota Code 645.08 – Canons of Construction
When Federal Law Changes the Answer
Minnesota Statutes do not stand alone. Under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, federal law overrides state law when the two conflict.12Constitution Annotated. Article VI – Supreme Law, Clause 2 In areas like immigration, bankruptcy, and patent law, Congress has largely displaced state authority. In other areas, federal and state law run alongside each other, with federal law setting a floor the state can build on. Minnesota’s minimum wage, workplace safety standards, and environmental rules all have federal counterparts, and in many of those areas Minnesota requires more than federal law does. If your question touches a federally regulated subject, the Minnesota statute by itself may not be the whole picture.