A visiting professor at Harvard Law School who heads a Brazilian think tank promoting gun control laws is on administrative leave after being arrested for allegedly firing a pellet rifle outside a synagogue on the night of Yom Kippur. 

The professor, Carlos Portugal Gouvêa, who graduated with a doctorate from Harvard’s law school in 2008, says he was using the pellet gun to hunt “rats” in the neighborhood where he lives a few doors down from Temple Beth Zion.

After hearing “loud shots” fired on Wednesday evening, two security guards from the synagogue reportedly approached Mr. Gouvêa, who was holding the gun, but set it down as they approached. After a “brief physical struggle,” Mr. Gouvêa allegedly “lunged toward the rifle” and ran into his home.

Twelve police officers responded to the incident and arrested him at 9:07 p.m. while services at the independent temple were ongoing. Police reported that they also found a parked vehicle with a shattered window and a pellet inside the car.

The Brookline District Court charged Mr. Gouvêa with illegally discharging a pellet gun, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, and vandalizing property. He pleaded not guilty on Thursday, was released, and faces a hearing in early November. 

HLS spokesman Jeff Neal told Harvard’s Crimson studnt newspaper that Mr. Gouvêa “has been placed on administrative leave as the school seeks to learn more about this matter.” He is not facing formal disciplinary action at this time. 

While a visiting professor at Harvard, Mr. Gouvêa is also an associate professor at University of São Paulo Law School and executive director of the Institute of Global Law. He is an associate at the think tank, Sou da Paz Institute, or the “I Am for Peace” Institute, which seeks to reduce levels of violence in Brazil through strengthening control of guns and ammunition while promoting civil society engagement. The organization received more than $2.7 million from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations between 2016 and 2023 and $250,000 in a 2022 multiyear grant from the Ford Foundation, among other international donors. 

Mr. Gouvêa has also criticized the Trump administration for applying sanctions against the Brazilian supreme court justice, Alexandre de Moraes, and his attorney wife, Viviane Barci de Moraes. Justice de Moraes last month sentenced former Brazilian president and ally of Mr. Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, to more than 27 years in prison on coup-related charges after Bolsonaro challenged his 2022 defeat to Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva. Mr. Gouvêa called the sanctions against the justice, his wife, and other officials, “an affront to Brazilian sovereignty and judicial independence.”

Mr. Gouvêa currently teaches corporate governance in the 21st century, focused on environmental, governmental, and governance policies by global corporations. Harvard and the Trump administration are in the midst of reaching a settlement over withheld federal funding in response to campus anti-Semitism and the failure to protect Jewish students from anti-Israel protesters.