Charles R. DiSalvo

Woodrow A. Potesta Professor of Law, West Virginia University College of Law

Photo by Greg Ellis/WVU.

By Blair Dowler. Charles DiSalvo values the common good, which is evident in his law career—a career he has devoted to public interest and poverty law. Since 1979, the current Woodrow A. Potesta Professor of Law at the West Virginia University (WVU) College of Law continues to serve the public interest by introducing law students to this type of legal work.

“The purpose of the law is not to protect the strong from the weak or the powerful from the powerless,” he says. “The purpose of the law is to protect the weak from the strong and the powerless from the powerful. I ask my students to use the law when they are practitioners in a way that fulfills its purpose.”

DiSalvo earned his undergraduate degree in history from St. John Fisher College in Rochester, NY, in 1970. He then began a Ph.D. program in history at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, CA, but, after obtaining a master’s degree, he realized his life’s calling was helping people through the practice of law.

“While I greatly value history and have spent a great deal of time as a law professor writing about history, my time in this particular graduate program made the LSAT look awfully interesting,” he says. “I understood the law to be a helping profession, so I took the LSAT and enrolled at the University of Southern California (USC).”

DiSalvo made the most of his time as a law student at USC. Gleaning wisdom from both his professors and peers, he participated in the school’s clinic and law review. He also honed his writing skills as the editor of This Issue, the law school’s student newspaper.

After graduating law school in 1974, he was awarded the Reginald Heber Smith Community Lawyer Fellowship. DiSalvo and his wife expressed a strong interest in Appalachia, and he was assigned to the Appalachian Research and Defense Fund (ARDF) of Kentucky. He passed the Kentucky bar examination in July 1974 and went directly to work in the private, nonprofit law firm in Barbourville, KY, which provides free civil legal aid to low-income people in counties across the Appalachian Mountains.

After four years at ARDF, DiSalvo and his wife moved to Chicago. This is where he launched his academic career adventure. For the 1978-1979 academic year, the attorney served as a Bigelow Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, where he learned a great deal from his mentor, Geoff Stone, a distinguished first amendment scholar.

“At the end of my time at the University of Chicago School of Law, I had decided not to teach but to return to practice,” he says. “Bob Bastress, the current John W. Fisher II Professor of Law at the WVU College of Law, invited me and my wife to Morgantown, where I met several faculty members. Their personal warmth and their enthusiasm for their work persuaded me to re-think my decision to leave academia. When I was offered a position at WVU by then-Dean Gordon Gee, I took it. I was attracted to WVU because it was welcoming, warm and concerned with the common good.”

DiSalvo has now called WVU home for 38 years. The public servant began as an assistant professor and was also hired to be the director of the WVU College of Law Clinic, which he says made the transition from practice to life as a full-time academic comfortable. In less than 10 years, he rose from an assistant professor to the Woodrow A. Potesta Professor. As his career at WVU continues to thrive, his connection to the Mountain State only grows stronger.

“Just as the atmosphere at the law school is more collegial than that at many other law schools, so, too, with the bar,” he says. “While the practice atmosphere here is not perfect, of course, the size and quality of the West Virginia bar is such that the practice of law in this state takes place in an atmosphere that is palpably more collegial than that in most other jurisdictions. I’m grateful that my bar license says West Virginia on it.”

As a Mountaineer, the law professor teaches one of the few law school courses in the U.S. on civil disobedience and the law. He also teaches courses on civil procedure, bioethics and trial advocacy.

DiSalvo says the Potesta endowed professorship has afforded him the ability to conduct research on Mahatma Gandhi, a pillar of the civil disobedience movement. The professor’s astute writing skills, deep interest in history and passion for helping others were some of the key components to the perfect formula for authoring a book about Gandhi, the widely recognized leader of Indian nationalism in British-ruled India who employed nonviolent civil disobedience, inspiring movements for civil rights across the world. With the help of many research assistants from the law school and history department at WVU, DiSalvo published the first biography of Gandhi’s life as a lawyer, a milestone DiSalvo considers to be his greatest accomplishment.

DiSalvo’s “M.K. Gandhi, Attorney at Law: The Man Before the Mahatma” is not your typical historical depiction of Gandhi’s legacy as a civil rights leader. Published in 2013, in this biography, DiSalvo digs deeper into Gandhi’s experience in the law as a significant factor in the development of his philosophy and practice of nonviolence. DiSalvo goes on to paint the picture with riveting details of Gandhi discovering “within the law the grand dynamic that converts disobedience to change—change even in the law itself.”

Complementing his robust teaching career and Mohandas Gandhi expertise, DiSalvo is also committed to volunteer work with organizations and causes centered around working for the public interest, including the West Virginia State Bar Association’s Legal Services for the Poor Committee, Rural Scholarship Committee, State Bar Public Interest Scholarship Committee, Mountain State Justice Board of Directors, St. Francis De Sales Church Refugee Committee and WVU College of Law’s Sustainability Committee.

In the mid-1980s, DiSalvo was instrumental in the formation of the West Virginia Fund for Law in the Public Interest, Inc. A law student at the time and today an attorney in Hurricane, WV, Carl Hostler asked DiSalvo to be the faculty adviser for the Public Interest Advocates student organization. Not long after, DiSalvo and Hostler co-founded the fund.

“The purpose of the fund is to raise funds to support law students working in the public interest,” says DiSalvo. “Over the years, the private bar has been incredibly supportive of the fund. Through its generosity, the private bar has helped create innumerable summer and post-grad fellowships. Many of our brother and sister West Virginians have received essential help as a result of legal work performed by our fellows.”

DiSalvo advised the Public Interest Advocates and the fund for 23 years. The fund, the single largest employer of WVU law students, has placed 440 students in public interest summer jobs. Today, he remains a member of the fund board.

His vast knowledge and extensive service to the WVU College of Law and the legal profession has helped DiSalvo earn numerous college, university, state and national awards. DiSalvo has been named the WVU College of Law Professor of the Year six times, and he has earned the WVU Foundation Outstanding Teacher Award. While he is very grateful for these accolades, there is something that means much more to him.

“While I have very much appreciated the sentiments behind the honors, there are things in life more important than awards,” he says. “What has the deepest significance to me is the opportunity to work with my students at the College of Law. I would like every student who comes to the College of Law with a desire to engage in public interest work in West Virginia to graduate with such a job in hand.”

The professor of law considers the opportunity to serve on the law school’s faculty to be one of the most meaningful jobs a person can have, though he does miss the opportunity to do public interest litigation. “I miss coming into daily contact with people who need the most basic help to get through life,” he says.

At the end of the day, DiSalvo’s faith, family and friends keep him motivated in his demanding career.

“Work should be fulfilling. To make it fulfilling, each of us tries to unite our work, on the one hand, with our morality, politics and spirituality on the other. Each of us tries to be integrated,” he says. “The law is special in that it offers each of us, whether we are practitioners or professors, a heightened opportunity to unite what we do with what we believe. While I don’t always succeed at it, I’m grateful for that opportunity.”