Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a Republican. He served in a Republican White House, typically votes with the Court’s other Republicans, and even sometimes sides with President Donald Trump in major cases that divide the Republican Party. He’s not the sort of person you’d expect to carry a torch for a liberal cause for nearly four full decades. But, well, he did. In Kavanaugh’s majority opinion in Pitchford v. Cain , which was handed down on Thursday, the justice more or less implemented a proposal for how to prevent racism from infecting jury selection that he first proposed in a 1989 piece that he published when he was still a law student. SCOTUS, Explained Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser. To be clear, Kavanaugh’s Pitchford opinion doesn’t really break much new ground. It involves a straightforward violation of Batson v.…