The University of Colorado Law School is pleased to welcome three new faculty members this fall, with expertise in commercial law, employment law, and the law of financial institutions.
Rabea Benhalim
Associate Professor Rabea Benhalim teaches Contracts and Secured Transactions. Prior to joining the Colorado Law faculty, she was the 2017-2019 William H. Hastie Fellow at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Her research focuses on comparative Islamic and Jewish Law. Benhalim’s recently published articles inside “The Case for American Muslim Arbitration" (Wisconsin Law Review) and "Religious Courts in Secular Jurisdictions" (Brooklyn Law Review).
Benhalim's prior work experience as a lawyer and policy expert includes positions at the Brookings Institution, Mayer Brown LLP, Maersk Oil, and the Carter Center. She holds a master’s of public policy degree from the University of Michigan and a JD from the University of Texas. She is a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.
Zach Mountin (’10)
Colorado Law alumnus Zach Mountin ('10) joined the Clinical Education Program in June as associate clinical professor and director of the Civil Practice Clinic.
A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Mountin earned a BA from Marquette University. He served in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps in Anchorage, Alaska, working as a case worker with runaway and homeless teenagers at Covenant House Alaska. His work with at-risk youth sparked an interest in the law and ultimately brought him to Colorado Law, where he served as editor-in-chief of the University of Colorado Law Review. Mountin also served as a law clerk for Justice Melissa Hart on the Colorado Supreme Court.
Mountin previously served as a trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he focused his practice on employment and housing discrimination cases and litigated cases before a variety of administrative courts and coordinating with the Department of Justice on federal court litigation. He gave frequent trainings to both internal and external stakeholders on employment and fair housing issues.
Mountin is developing a new employment law component of the Civil Practice Clinic in which law students will represent low-income wage workers seeking compensation, workers facing discrimination, and government employees at risk of losing their jobs. These cases will allow students to develop their civil litigation skills while expanding access to justice for workers who would normally go unrepresented.
Nadav Orian Peer
Associate Professor Nadav Orian Peer’s research and teaching focus on the law of financial institutions, including banking, capital markets, derivatives, and community development. He will teach Financial Institutions, Bankruptcy, and Property, as well as a seminar titled Public Purpose Finance.
Orian Peer’s work studies the intense framework of governance and regulation that undergirds the day-to-day functioning of financial markets. The design and operation of this framework has profound implications for the distribution of credit and economic opportunity in society. His current research explores policy proposals to increase access to credit in the fields of fair housing and climate mitigation.
His recent articles include “Negotiating the Lender-of-Last-Resort: The 1913 Fed Act as a Debate Over Credit Distribution” (15 NYU Journal of Law & Business, 2019) and “Your Grandfather’s Shadow Banking: Clearing and Call Loans in Gilded Age New York” (forthcoming in Inside Money: Re-Theorizing Liquidity, (University of Pennsylvania Press, Christine Desan ed.). His current research explores policy proposals to increase access to credit in the fields of fair housing and climate mitigation.
Prior to joining Colorado Law, Orian Peer taught as a visiting assistant professor at Tulane Law School and worked as a business economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago (Financial Markets Group). He completed an SJD at Harvard Law School, where he taught as a Byse Fellow, and an LLB at Tel-Aviv University. As a member of the Israel Bar Association, he also practiced commercial litigation, specializing in bankruptcy and secured transactions.