Muskie-Chafee Award Recipients

Graphic by ENRD

James L. Rosen
2024
Senior Counsel, U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC).

Jamie Rosen is Senior Counsel in the San Francisco office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC). Jamie has been an attorney in that office for 26 years and works exclusively on forest management matters for the U.S. Forest Service.

Since joining OGC, Jamie has specialized in Forest Service matters involving the nexus between timber harvest, wildlife conservation, fire management, and ecological restoration. In supporting the Forest Service, Jamie divides his time between providing pre-decisional advice and defending the agency in litigation. In this latter role, Jamie has worked very closely with Department of Justice attorneys throughout ENRD, with cases ranging from District Court challenges to individual forest management projects to Supreme Court review of regional forest management plans. Among Jamie’s most significant cases was the defense of the 2004 Sierra Nevada Forest Plan Amendment, which involved challenges from environmental groups, the State of California, and the timber industry to a regional forest management plan designed to increase the pace and scale of fire hazard reduction treatments while conserving wildlife habitat. Jamie’s untiring and creative work with ENRD attorneys avoided the shutdown of forest management actives across 11 National Forests spanning more that 11 million acres. The plan remains central to the Forest Service’s efforts to balance reduction of fire risk and protection of wildlife species on the Sierra Nevada National Forests.

Outside of his advising and litigation duties, Jamie has spent much of his career on training and education initiatives. Jamie’s most significant contribution in this area has been the development of the Forestry for Lawyer’s course, a 5-day field course in forest ecology and management on the Plumas National Forest in northern California. The course was designed to provide DOJ and OGC attorneys that represent the Forest Service with a crash course in forest ecology and management to better represent the Forest Service in project planning and litigation defense. Since the first course in 2009, approximately 200 DOJ and OGC attorneys from around the country have attended the course.

Prior to joining OGC, Jamie received joint graduate degrees in law and forestry from U.C. Berkeley, and a bachelor's degree in government and environmental studies from Dartmouth College. Between obtaining his undergraduate and graduate degrees, Jamie was a mountaineering instructor for the Colorado Outward Bound School and a “hooter” for the National Biological Survey (USGS), surveying for northern spotted owls deep in the old growth forests of Olympic National Park.