Jack M. Beard Associate Professor of Law and Director, Space, Cyber, and National Security Law Program
Professor Jack Beard joined the law faculty in 2011. Before coming to Nebraska, he was a member of the faculty at the UCLA School of Law. He previously served for fourteen years as the Associate Deputy General Counsel (International Affairs) in the Department of Defense where he was responsible for a variety of legal matters related to arms control agreements, defense cooperation and basing agreements in the Middle East region, and programs assisting states of the former Soviet Union in dismantlement of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and other nonproliferation activities. These latter activities included the removal of nuclear weapons from Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine and the elimination of other WMDs and related infrastructure in those countries. He served as the senior lawyer on numerous U.S. delegations negotiating international agreements on a wide range of U.S. military operations and activities. He also served on active and reserve duty as an officer in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General’s Corps, where his assignments included Chief of the International Law Section, International and Operational Law Division, Office of The Judge Advocate General of the Army. He is a Lieutenant Colonel in U.S. Army JAG Corps (Retired).
Professor Beard is a Director of the Space, Cyber, and National Security Law Program, teaching courses in International Cyber Security and National Security Space Law. He also teaches courses in National Security Law, Arms Control, and Human Rights & International Criminal Law. His primary research interests focus on public international law and national security law, with a particular emphasis upon space law and military uses of space, cyber capabilities, arms control, the law of armed conflict, and the international legal implications of modern military technologies. He was recognized as a Cyber Security & Data Privacy Trailblazer by the National Law Journal.
Professor Beard is the Editor-in-Chief of the Woomera Manual on the International Law of Military Space Activities and Operations (Oxford University Publishing, forthcoming 2024).
Professor Beard is the Chairman of the Committee on the Use of Force of the American Branch of the International Law Association (ABILA), a member of the ABILA Board of Directors, and is one of the U.S. representatives on the London-based International Law Association’s Committee on the Use of Force. He is also a member of the International Institute of Space Law.
Watch to see how Professor Beard is guiding the laws of military space operations.
Y.S. (Steve) Lee Adjunct Professor
Professor Lee is a lawyer, economist, and international relations scholar with internationally-recognized authority in law and development and international trade law. He is currently Director and Professorial Fellow of the Law and Development Institute and Visiting Professor of Law, University of Nebraska College of Law. He has also taught and conducted academic research at prominent universities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia for twenty years. He graduated with a degree in economics and academic distinction from the University of California at Berkeley and received law degrees from the University of Cambridge (B.A., M.A., Ph.D). He is licensed to practice law in multiple jurisdictions, including the United States (California and North Carolina) and the United Kingdom.
Professor Lee has published over one hundred academic articles, books, chapters, and shorter notes with leading publishers in North America, Europe, and Asia, in the areas of international economic law, law and development, development/institutional economics, comparative law, and international commercial arbitration. He has developed the “General Theory of Law and Development” and the “New General Theory of Development Economics,” which examines the causal mechanisms by which law impacts development and analyzes the constituent elements of economic development, respectively. He is currently an associate editor of the Journal of World Trade and the founding editor-in-chief of the Law and Development Review.
Professor Lee participated in a number of bilateral and multilateral negotiations on international trade and investment at international forums such as the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law. He has appeared before WTO dispute settlement panels and the WTO Appellate Body as a government counsel, and advised national governments, international law firms, and consulting companies on international trade and development projects and major international commercial arbitration cases. He has frequently spoken on issues of international economic law, law and development, and the WTO through over seventy speech engagements at prominent forums such as Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, and the World Bank.
Brian D. Lepard Harold W. Conroy Distinguished Professor of Law
Professor Lepard is a leading expert in the fields of international law, human rights law, comparative law, and tax law. He joined the faculty in 1995. He received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1983. At Princeton, he was named a Scholar of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and concentrated on the study of international law and organization, receiving a prize from the Woodrow Wilson School for his thesis on the development of the idea of the League of Nations in France during the First World War. Following his graduation from Princeton, he worked for three years as an international human rights law specialist at the United Nations Office of the Baha'i International Community, a non-governmental organization. In 1989, he received his J.D. degree from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Journal of International Law. From 1989 until 1995 he practiced tax law as an associate with the Philadelphia-based law firm of Dechert Price & Rhoads, with a special focus on international tax law as well as exempt organizations law.
Professor Lepard has multidisciplinary scholarly and teaching interests in the fields of international human rights law; humanitarian intervention; international legal theory; comparative law, including comparative religious law; ethics; and tax and business law, including international tax law. He is the author of eight books and numerous articles relating to these diverse subject areas. Professor Lepard has spoken on the subjects of international law, human rights, and comparative law at conferences and other gatherings around the world, including in Albania, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, France, French Polynesia, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
Professor Lepard holds the Harold W. Conroy Distinguished Professor of Law chair at the College of Law. He is the faculty adviser for the Law College’s program of concentrated study on international human rights law. He is a member of the editorial review boards of a number of academic journals, including The Journal of Human Rights, Religion and Human Rights: An International Journal, and The Journal of Baha'i Studies. He currently serves as chair of the Committee on the Formation of Customary International Law of the American Branch of the International Law Association and has served as chair of the International Legal Theory Interest Group of the American Society of International Law. He is a member of the International Board of Consultants of the Global Ethics and Religion Forum and of the Board of Advisors of Genocide Watch. He has also served as faculty adviser to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Bahá'í Association.
During the 2019-2020 academic year, Professor Lepard is teaching International Human Rights Law Seminar, Comparative Law: World Legal Systems and Their Relevance to U.S. Law and Practice, International Perspectives in the U.S. Legal System: Practicing Law in a Global Legal Environment, and Business Planning.
Professor Lepard is admitted to practice in Nebraska, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and before the U.S. Tax Court. He is fluent in French and proficient in Portuguese.