Next week, you will receive the first issue of the Brennan Center’s new State Court Report newsletter. At a time when state courts and constitutions are increasingly significant sources of a broad range of rights, State Court Report will cover legal trends in state constitutional law, along with cutting-edge scholarship and cases to watch.

State courts and state constitutions have often taken a backseat to their federal counterparts in the modern era, but there is also a long history of state constitutions as sites of innovation and expansion across issue areas and ideological lines – from curbing partisan gerrymandering to protecting property rights. State Court Report will foster dialog, commentary, and research about an important, but underappreciated, area of law.

The House Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing this Thursday to investigate Justice Samuel Alito’s alleged leak of his 2014 decision in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and the lobbying of Supreme Court justices by the religious right. The Hobby Lobby decision allowed private employers to deny employees health coverage of contraception based on employers’ religious beliefs.

Last month, the New York Times reported allegations that Justice Alito leaked the outcome of Hobby Lobby to an associate of Rev. Rob Schenck, then-leader of the evangelical lobbying organization Faith & Action, weeks before the opinion was released. Thursday’s hearing will address “Operation Higher Court,” a campaign started by Reverend Schenck in 2000 to build relationships between wealthy conservative activists and Supreme Court justices to influence rulings.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), the chairs of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees, sent several letters to the Supreme Court requesting additional information about the alleged leak. “If the Court . . . is not willing to undertake fact-finding inquiries into possible ethics violations, that leaves Congress as the only forum,” they wrote. The Supreme Court’s response denies that the leak, or any other ethical violations, occurred.

A new study on the hiring of law clerks for federal appellate judges found that while most judges express interest in employing diverse groups of clerks, various aspects of the hiring process, including a lack of transparency and communication between judges, make it difficult to achieve diversity.

The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 50 active federal judges — representing judges from all circuits, nominated by presidents of both parties, and across race and gender identities — to discuss their clerk selection methods. They found that most judges understand diversity “capaciously,” valuing factors including race, gender, law school attended, socioeconomic status, and ideology.

The study found that judges who have been most successful in hiring clerks of color are those who “make affirmative efforts to draw minority candidates into their applicant pool or place greater emphasis on indicators of talent besides grades and law school rank.”

The study proposes steps that the federal judiciary could take to improve this system, including public reporting of data on clerk demographics and the creation of a clerkship resource liaison for each circuit “to help judges expand their networks and conduct outreach to faculty and students in ways that further their hiring objectives.”