In late July and early August 2018 Professor Brian Lepard taught a one-week course entitled “Hot Topics in International Law” at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (“UFRGS”) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Furthermore, he was a guest speaker in a course at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (“PUCRS”) on freedom of expression and the regulation of hate speech under international law. Professor Lepard also gave a major talk at PUCRS, sponsored by the Instituto de Estudos Tributários (Institute for Tax Studies), on the Tax Cut and Jobs Act adopted by Congress and signed into law by President Trump in December 2017. In this connection, Zero Hora, one of Brazil’s largest circulation national newspapers, published an interview in its August 6, 2018 edition with Professor Brian Lepard about the new tax law and its implications for Brazil. (A reproduction of the page containing the interview can be found here. An online version is available here.)
In July 2018, the Israel Law Review published a highly favorable review of Professor Lepard’s edited 2017 book Reexamining Customary International Law. The review concluded: “The book provides new perspectives on many of the problems, challenges and mysteries related to the notion of [customary international law]. . . . Overall, the . . . book presents novel arguments on how to re-examine [customary international law], and it does so insightfully.”
During the summer of 2018 Professor Lepard worked on a number of scholarly projects, including an article on a Third World perspective on customary international law for the online edition of the American Journal of International Law, an article on international human rights law (in Portuguese), and an edited book entitled Transforming the Global Legal Order: Bahá’í Principles and Social Justice.