John Lyght, Minnesota’s first African American sheriff, faced different challenges than his constituents as one of the only African Americans in Cook County. A reputation for fairness, however, won him multiple re-elections with wide support between 1972 and 1994.

From statehood in May 1858 until May 1896, Minnesota had one resident federal district court judge. His name was Rensselaer Russell Nelson.

The only documented hanging held in Clay County occurred on September 20, 1889, when Thomas Brown was hanged for the murder of Moorhead Patrolman Peter Poull. Newspapers across the country reported on the sensational event; the Los Angeles Herald called it “a quiet execution.”

After the intense violence of the first few decades of the twentieth century, the St. Paul Police Department (SPPD) experienced a period of steady growth and relative social calm in the 1930s. During these "quiet years," the department expanded, reformed its policies, and experimented with new ideas and technologies.

Lois Jenson and her coworkers Patricia S. Kosmach and Kathleen Anderson filed the lawsuit Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co. in 1988, after years of harassment at Eveleth Mines on the Mesabi Iron Range. The case became the first sexual harassment class action tried in US federal court and set a precedent for future harassment trials.

Harry Blackmun was the third Minnesotan to serve on the US Supreme Court, after Pierce Butler (associate justice, 1923–1939) and Warren Burger (chief justice, 1969–1986), and he stayed the longest: twenty-four years. He was little known outside legal circles until he wrote the decision in Roe v. Wade (1973) that established Constitutional protection of abortion.

Joseph Israel Lobdell, also known as La-Roi and Lucy Ann Lobdell, spent two years in Minnesota in the late 1850s. In 1858, a Meeker County attorney charged him with "impersonating a man," claiming that such an action was a crime. The judge trying the case disagreed, ruling that Lobdell (who had been assigned a female sex at birth) had committed no offense by dressing in men’s clothes.

In 1941, Minneapolis leftists from the Socialist Workers Party and Teamsters union local 544 were accused of conspiracy to overthrow the government under the Alien Registration Act. Twenty-eight were indicted; eighteen were convicted and sentenced to prison.

Albert Alonzo Ames, called “Doc,” was mayor of Minneapolis four times, between 1876 and 1903. Though he earned notoriety as "the shame of Minneapolis" for his involvement in extortion and fraud during his last term in office, Ames also won praise for his work as a doctor and an advocate for veterans.

The first murder to reach the courts of what would become Minnesota took place during the early infancy of St. Paul, in the late summer of 1839. Though both victim and main suspect were quickly identified, the case was never solved.