Written by: Gloria Kosir

Hudson Kingston (10JD), a graduate of the College of Law, recently returned to teach a week-long intersession course on the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and environmental law. Kingston has worked in environmental law for over a decade since graduating, including for several non-profit organizations. He is now the legal director of CURE, a Minnesota environmental organization.

Kingston has followed and supported the Hubbell Environmental Law Initiative in its mission to support Iowa Law students’ environmental legal education. He had considered teaching a class for more than a year, and in 2025, he began to collaborate with former colleague Kevin Bell, a 2015 graduate of the New York University College of Law and founder of Free Information Group, PLLC, to set the wheels in motion. 

“It's really wonderful to get to give back to the law school after having been a student. I’m really excited for what HELI is doing,” Kingston said.

Kingston and Bell had previously worked together as staff attorneys at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an environmental whistleblower organization. Now, years later, they combined their legal expertise to design and teach a course to address an issue they recognized: a lack of understanding of public records.

“We’ve seen that there’s a great need in the legal community, but also in the wider public, for an understanding of open records laws,” Kingston said.

The two designed the course to give students hands-on experience working with FOIA in much the same way as professionals in federal agencies. Students learned how FOIA requests are prepared and processed, what types of records are subject to disclosure under the law, how agencies develop and issue responses, and several of the most commonly used exemptions in environmental contexts.

“The same way that we were sort of ground-level attorneys, we taught the students to do FOIA as ground-level bureaucrats would understand it,” Bell said. “The one-week intensive course is very abbreviated, obviously, compared to a full semester, but it is head and shoulders above certainly what I received as an attorney in the federal government.” 

Students then completed a final simulation exercise in which they analyzed and marked up a set of mock agency records as if they were staff attorneys within a federal agency, drawing from course readings, lessons, and even cases in which the instructors were involved. 

“Students get their hands dirty and actually interact with the law in a way that they can’t for most of their other classes,” Kingston said. 

This approach to the course material was extremely effective, rising 3L Claire Benson said.

“As part of our course assessments, my classmates and I drafted our own FOIA requests to submit to a federal agency, as well as took on the role of an agency FOIA officer and reviewed whether to release or withhold documents in response to hypothetical FOIA requests,” Benson shared. “The course was an incredibly valuable experience.

Kingston’s and Bell’s successful legal careers complemented each other throughout the course. Leaning on Kingston’s environmental background and Bell’s FOIA work, the duo created a lesson plan that offers a strong foundation for students.

“I wanted them to take away that FOIA is the best way for an individual to punch above their weight whenever it comes to interfacing with the government, because anybody has the right to request any agency record from any federal agency, which is very broadly defined,” Bell said. “It's not just a course in FOIA—it's a course in responsible citizenship.”