Artificial intelligence, practice claims, and focusing on access to “information” instead of “records” can improve the public’s ability to acquire government information, as proposed by winners of a special Journal of Civic Information research competition.

Three research studies earned top honors in the contest to mark the 60^th anniversary of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act this year. Winners will present their findings at Sunshine Fest in March and have their work published in a special issue of the Journal of Civic Information, which is published by the University of Florida Joseph L. Brechner Freedom of Information Project.

The first-place study, by Yale law students Andrea DenHoed and Anna Selbrede, explores the use of “practice claims” to enforce FOIA. The practice, recognized by the courts in 1988, allows anyone to sue the government not just for the particular document they want, but to address systemic problems and patterns in the dissemination of public records, such as persistent backlogs.

The second-place winner, by Frank LoMonte of the University of Georgia, argues that it is time for freedom of information laws to apply to information broadly, not just to documents. LoMonte, former director of the Brechner FOI Project and also counsel for CNN, suggests that laws should require government agencies to compile information of interest to the public and proactively post it online. He notes that the practice has precedent, such as the Clery Act’s requirement that universities post crime data online.

The third-place paper, by Erin Coyle of Arizona State University and Eric P. Robinson of the University of South Carolina, examines the use of artificial intelligence by federal agencies to gather and review records, and provides recommendations for future use of AI in FOIA.

All three papers address ways of improving U.S. FOIA for the next 60 years. The papers were reviewed through peer review by a panel of scholars expert in freedom of information research. Other finalist papers for the competition included:

• FOIA’s future: Agentic AI’s potential to transform the FOIA requester eXperience, by Jason R. Baron, University of Maryland, and Eliot Wilczek, MITRE
• An end to topictivity: Making all topics equally transparent under the Freedom of Information Act, by Benjamin W. Cramer of Penn State University
• The media history of FOIA and a journalism of transparency: Early reactions in the trade press to the law’s adoption and revision, by Will Mari of Louisiana State University
• A decade of uneven disclosure: FOIA request outcomes as seen on MuckRock, 2016-2025, by Elizaveta “Liza” Kalinina of Texas State University

The Journal of Civic Information is an open-access peer-reviewed journal founded in 2019 by the Brechner FOI Project to support research in access to information.

Posted: February 16, 2026
Category: Brechner News
Tagged as: Brechner FOI Project, Government Transparency, Journal of Civic Information