U.S. Navy Vice Admiral James W. Houck, the judge advocate general for the Navy, has high regard for the way Penn State has guided the Dickinson School of Law toward a greater global presence, Houck said last week.
A State College native, Houck visited the University Park campus on Friday to speak at Dickinson about international law and legal practices in the Navy. In an interview before his talk, he said Dickinson ‘was for many years a very high-quality but locally focused, Pennsylvania-focused law school.’
Now, he said, with its expanded vision and collaborative work with the new Penn State School of International Affairs, Dickinson has struck a ‘synergy between policy and the legal side.’
‘Certainly, a quality school like this would be a great source of Navy judge advocates,’ Houck said. He senses that the school encourages students to ‘look beyond some of the traditional practice areas that they might have focused on, say, 10, 15, 20 years ago,’ he said.
In 2000, Penn State essentially acquired Dickinson — then based solely in Carlisle — and has since transformed the school into a dual-campus operation.
Houck, no stranger to Penn State, grew up in the Park Forest area of State College and graduated from State College Area High School in 1976. His father, a newspaper reporter and editor, was once the sports editor at the Centre Daily Times.
‘I always admired what he did and wanted to follow in his footsteps,’ Houck said. But his father, he said, encouraged him to try another avenue of service before delving into journalism.
‘It was my teenage rebellion to go into the Naval Academy’ in Annapolis, Md., Houck said.
He went on to serve aboard the destroyer USS Caron, then went to the Navy Law Education Program and earned a degree from the University of Michigan Law School. Houck also holds a Master of Law from the Georgetown University Law Center.
In August 2009, after ascending the military ranks, Houck was named the 41st judge advocate general of the Navy. As the JAG, he is the primary source of military legal counsel for the secretary of the Navy and for the chief of Naval Operations. Houck also oversees the entire legal staff of the global Navy JAG Corps.
Meeting with StateCollege.com, Houck underscored the Navy’s role in hostility prevention overseas and its civilian work in Afghanistan, where it’s collaborating with government ministries to promote lawful decision-making processes and due-process principles.
Navy lawyers also have played a prominent part in helping to restore and maintain order in natural-disaster-wracked Haiti, Houck said, focusing on the Navy’s less-recognized humanitarian operations.
‘I think that our Navy today is involved around the world in ways that people are maybe not as aware of,’ he said. ‘When they turn the television on, they see people in Iraq and Afghanistan’ with machine guns, going door to door.
That’s a real part of the U.S. presence overseas, but the Navy plays less-obvious parts in keeping sea transit lanes safe and conducting relief missions, too, Houck said.
And it’s important ‘for people in the country — including in central Pennsylvania — to understand’ that, he said.
