MFIA Student Directors Andrea DenHoed and Anna Selbrede Honored for FOIA Research
Media Freedom and Information Access (MFIA) Clinic student directors Andrea DenHoed ’26 and Anna Selbrede ’26 were honored at Sunshine Fest in Washington, D.C. for their research theorizing how “policy or practice” claims can successfully be brought against federal agencies that routinely fail to satisfy their disclosure obligations. Their paper was awarded first place in a special research competition organized by the University of Florida’s Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project in connection with the 60th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
DenHoed and Selbrede’s research grew out of MFIA’s work on Scoville v. U.S. Department of State, a lawsuit challenging the State Department’s chronically slow responses to FOIA requests. Their paper explores how “policy or practice” claims can be used to expand relief under FOIA from the disclosure of records in a single case into relief addressing the systemic agency failures that prevent timely access to public information.
In the Scoville litigation, MFIA represents a Marquette University Law School professor whose research was thwarted by State Department delay in releasing data it routinely collects. The professor submitted multiple FOIA requests over several years that were held by delays and nonresponses. One FOIA request for data on U.S. sales of military equipment to foreign countries, for example, was submitted to the State Department in March 2020. The department did not respond for nearly a year, and the eventual respond it would not begin looking for the records for another two years, until 2023.
MFIA’s lawsuit alleges that such delays reflect a broad pattern of repeated, prolonged, and unjustified delays in the agency’s FOIA processing. FOIA sets a baseline deadline of 20 working days for agency responses, yet requestors often wait years to obtain records from the State Department. The lawsuit contends that these delays are the result of an ongoing policy or practice by the department to disregard FOIA’s statutory disclosure timelines. The State Department’s own data shows the extent of the delays. At the end of fiscal year 2020, it had nearly 14,000 backlogged FOIA requests pending beyond the time the law permits and its reported average response times for “expedited” requests was 399 days.
The Scoville lawsuit was filed in January 2022 and survived a motion to dismiss. Following extensive fact discovery, summary judgment briefing is now ongoing. Meanwhile, its broader argument about FOIA compliance has become an important area of FOIA scholarship and litigation, and DenHoed and Selbrede’s paper helps explain why and how courts can help to remedy the situation with appropriate forms of relief. The two MFIA directors presented their first-place paper in Washington during Sunshine Week festivities and it will be published in a forthcoming volume of the Journal of Civic Information.
