The Supreme Courts latest term has just begun, and it is set to shove one of former President Donald Trumps appointees into the spotlight: Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Since the court achieved its six-vote conservative supermajority in 2020, Kavanaugh has issued concurrences in high-profile decisions that provided guidance or guardrails on the majority opinions that he joined. In each case, Kavanaughs effort to guide future decisions and place himself at the center of the court will be tested in this term.

In this term, the court will see several cases in which they will rule on what Kavanaugh meant in three key concurrences, in which he described limits to the courts decisions on three major topics overturning Roe v. Wade, vastly expanding gun rights and affirming Voting Rights Act precedents.

Kavanaughs concurrences, in theory, would limit the way these rulings can be applied to future cases. In practice, it remains to be seen if the court will stick to them.

A few upcoming cases, in particular, stand out as tests, all along similar lines to those of the last term: The dual abortion medication cases of Danco Laboratories v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine and Food and Drug Administration v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, the gun rights case Rahimi v. U.S. and the Louisiana voting rights case Ardoin v. Robinson will greatly inform what challenges litigants are willing to bring on these issues in the future.

And they place Kavanaugh at the center of the courts action now. That is not an unusual spot for Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, since he barely won Senate confirmation in 2018 after being accused of committing sexual assault in high school. He has denied the allegations. In the years since, he has firmly established himself as the conservative justice most likely to join Chief Justice John Roberts in forging compromises with the courts three liberal justices. His concurrences in two major wins for conservatives and one for liberals now put his attempt at presenting a moderate face to the test.

One of Kavanaughs concurrences has already been tested. In June, the court ruled in the case of Allen v. Milligan that Alabama violated the Voting Rights Act by drawing a racially discriminatory congressional map that included only one majority or plurality-Black district when demographics indicated it should have two such districts.

While Kavanaugh voted with the majority against Alabama, he also filed a separate concurrence suggesting that the ruling, upholding Section 2 of the Voting Rights Acts limits on racially discriminatory redistricting , should not last forever. Section 2 bans the enactment of election laws and district maps that result in the denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.

Kavanaugh wrote, [E]ven if Congress in 1982 could constitutionally authorize race-based redistricting under [Section 2] for some period of time, the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future.