Felicia Orth in the Rotunda at the Roundhouse in Santa Fe shows the award she received as 2025 Public Lawyer Of The Year from the Public Law Section of the State Bar of New Mexico. Photo by April Brown
Felicia Orth, second from right, is pictured with, from left, Lt. Gov. Howie Morales, former New Mexico Environment Department General Counsel Tracy Hughes, Orth, and Los Alamos County Municipal Judge Elizabeth Allen. Photo by Alexander Rose
Members of the League of Women Voters congratulate Felicia Orth following an event in her honor in the Rotunda at the Roundhouse. Photo by Alexander Rose
BY MAIRE O’NEILL
maire@losalamosreporter.com
Los Alamos attorney Felicia Orth has been named 2025 Public Lawyer of the Year by the Public Law Section of the State Bar of New Mexico.
“It was a real honor to be recognized for work that I’ve been doing now for almost 40 years, and to be honored in the State Capitol by colleagues and so many representatives of the different participants in the hearings that I conduct,” Orth told the Los Alamos Reporter. “The lawyers that nominated me included government lawyers, environmental and profit lawyers, and industry lawyers. All of them had come together to nominate me and that was a real privilege.”
Orth said most of the big strenuous hearings that she does are rulemaking hearings and when she talks about what it means to do rulemaking, her final line is always that “public hearings are where government regulations meet with democracy”.
“That’s how we get law. We feel like we are engaged in democratic behavior when the government is saying these are the rules we want to promulgate, and industry and environmental groups are coming and saying, well, we need to understand this and be part of the processes of rulemaking,” she said. “That’s mostly the strenuous hearings I’ve been doing for many years now. I have been in public law for 38 years, conducting hearings, including rule-making for 26. All in New Mexico. We moved here in 1986. Next year, it will be 40 years.”
Felicia Orth has been conducting public hearings since 1999 for a wide variety of governmental entities including the New Mexico Environment Department, the Water Quality Control Commission, Environmental Improvement Board, Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, Oil Conservation Commission, Mining Division, Mining Commission, Energy Conservation Management Division, State Parks Division, Forestry Division, Department of Health, State Personnel Office, Interstate Stream Commission, State Land Office, Racing Commission, Medical Board, Labor Management Relations Boards in Los Alamos and Bernalillo County and the Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Air Quality Control Board.
The nature of the hearings has ranged from professional licensing actions to permitting, enforcement and complex rulemaking.
Orth also spent two years working for the Los Alamos County Attorney’s Office and nine years in the New Mexico Environment Department’s Office of General Counsel, as Assistant and then Deputy General Counsel.
Prior to that, she worked in the St. Louis law firm of Coburn Croft on a class-action toxic tort lawsuit, which followed a clerkship with Judge Robert E. Hogan at the Missouri Court of Appeals.
Orth has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis and a law degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Her professional activities with the New Mexico State Bar have included service on the Medical Review Commission, the Committee on Public Legal Education and the Public Law Section Board.
Her service on non-profit boards in New Mexico has included Northern New Mexico United Way, Unitarian Churches in Los Alamos and Santa Fe, Sage Montessori School, Pajarito Environmental Education Center, Los Alamos County Board of Public Utilities, and the League of Women Voters of Los Alamos and New Mexico. Orth currently serves as the president of the LWV of Los Alamos. She has also served as a substitute Municipal Court Judge in Los Alamos.
Evan Rose, Felicia’s husband looks on proudly during the Roundhouse event. Photo by Alexander Rose
Felicia Orth shows her award to the Los Alamos Reporter during a recent interview. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com