Downtown Minny
The Land of 10,000 Lakes passed the Uniform Protection Act (UPEPA) as an anti-SLAPP law that may take effect on May 25, 2024, someday after Governor Tim Walz signed it. With the passage of UPEPA, Minnesota has a state-of-the-art anti-SLAPP law that, as its name suggests, protects free speech and related rights by providing for the early dismissal of abusive lawsuits that seek to obstruct or retaliate against the speaker within the lawful exercise of those rights.
The Minnesota UPEPA is essentially a clean takeover within the sense that there have been not too many changes to the uniform laws by making so-called inconsistent provisionsthat aren’t included within the uniform statute. However, Minnesota has included a lot of non-uniform exceptions to the scope of this statute, including civil claims against criminal offenders, property claims, claims for private injury and wrongful death, insurance claims, certain sexual harassment claims, certain public service claims, consumer protection claims, and claims under federal law.
I’ve written before about states expanding the list of exceptions to UPEPA protections through non-uniform provisions. They don’t really trouble me because I believe it’s good to have each state essentially act as a test tube to check what works and what doesn’t in practice. Anti-SLAPP laws should not be static, and the law won’t move forward unless some take risks with their ideas. So so long as a state like Minnesota keeps these non-uniform provisions throughout the statutory framework designed for them (as we intended once we drafted UPEPA) and doesn’t tinker with the opposite provisions in place, I’m effective with that. Long live the difference!
Before UPEPA, Minnesota had a reasonably good anti-SLAPP law. Too good, actually, because the Minnesota Supreme Court struck down that law since it violated the proper to a jury trial, as I explained in my article “Minnesota Court of Appeals Sets Clear and Convincing Burden of Proof for Anti-SLAPP” (January 13, 2017). That ruling caused Minnesota to go from having anti-SLAPP law to having no anti-SLAPP law in any respect overnight. Almost the identical thing happened in Washington state, which was the primary state to adopt UPEPA.
Here we see UPEPA doing what it was designed to do: provide states like Minnesota that had no anti-SLAPP law or had a problematic one with an out-of-the-box solution in order that they do not have to reinvent the wheel. A solid majority of U.S. states now have anti-SLAPP laws, and a couple of quarter of them have adopted UPEPA. I expect UPEPA to adopt not less than half of all anti-SLAPP laws inside the subsequent decade.
While residents of states with strong anti-SLAPP laws argue about whether the UPEPA is best or worse than their state’s existing laws, the hard truth is that the UPEPA is definitely higher since it offers the large advantage of uniformity of interpretation. This implies that courts in a single state which have not addressed a selected issue can look to other states’ court decisions when resolving that issue since the text of the law is more likely to be the exact same. States with their very own anti-SLAPP laws, whose laws differ from those of other states, cannot reap the benefits of this profit.
Be that as it could, the UPEPA has got off to a powerful start within the 2024 legislative session and is now being presented for consideration within the legislatures of several other states as well. It is especially noteworthy that the UPEPA has benefited from strong bipartisan support, which appears to be particularly rare as of late. More news on the rollout of the UPEPA is predicted shortly.
