Judge John L. Carroll
2018 American Inns of Court Professionalism Award for the Eleventh Circuit
ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA — The Honorable John L. Carroll has been selected to receive the prestigious 2018 American Inns of Court Professionalism Award for the Eleventh Circuit. He will be presented with the award by Judge Joel Dubina at the Eleventh Circuit Annual Judicial Conference in May at The Sawgrass Resort in Ponte Vedra, Florida.
Carroll has been a professor at Cumberland School of Law at Samford University in Alabama since 2001, where he teaches courses in evidence, trial advocacy, mediation, e-discovery, and professional responsibility. He served as dean of the law school from 2001 to 2014. From October 2014 to April 2015, Carroll served as acting director of the Alabama Ethics Commission. He also has taught courses at the law schools of the University of Alabama, Georgia State University, and Mercer University.
He served as a Magistrate Judge for the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Alabama from 1986 to 2001. He was an appellate judge in the claims process resulting from the 2010 oil spill at the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform. Before taking the bench, he was in private practice in Montgomery, Alabama.
Early in Carroll’s career, he served as legal director and attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center from 1975 to 1984, specializing in the trial of death penalty cases and class action civil rights litigation. He has made two oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States, and ten arguments before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.
Carroll is an active Master of the Bench in the Judge James Edwin Horton American Inn of Court. He is a member of the Model Veteran’s Treatment Court Act Drafting Committee for the Uniform Law Commission. Carroll served in the U.S. Marine Corps from June 1965 to December 1969 with combat service in Vietnam, achieving the rank of Captain. In 2016, he received the Veteran of Influence Award from the Birmingham Business Journal.
Having earned an undergraduate degree from Tufts University, Carroll attended Cumberland School of Law at Samford where he received his J.D. and served as associate editor of the law review. He went on to earn an LL.M. at Harvard Law School.