John Carroll, the former dean of Samford University’s Cumberland School of Law for more than a decade, has died, the university’s president, Beck A. Taylor, announced Monday.

“The Samford family mourns the passing of Judge John Carroll, Dean of Cumberland School of Law from 2001-2014,” Taylor tweeted Monday afternoon. “Judge Carroll was a beloved colleague and friend. Prayers extend to Susan and the entire family.”

Carroll graduated from Cumberland in 1974 and returned to the law school’s campus at Sanford in 2001 to become dean.

Under his tenure, the law school returned to an earlier focus on trial advocacy. U.S. News and World Report ranked Cumberland’s trial advocacy program fourth nationally in 2012, up from fifth in 2011.

In between his stops at Cumberland, Carroll was legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery from 1974 to 1984.

Carroll was also professor at Mercer University School of Law in Macon, Georgia and was in private practice from 1985 to 1986.

For 14 years, Carroll was a U.S. Magistrate Judge in the Montgomery-based Middle District of Alabama, from 1986 to 2001.

Carroll reflected on the unusual length of his tenure as Cumberland’s dean when he announced he was stepping down from his post to return to full-time teaching at the law school.

“The average tenure of a law school dean is less than five years,” he said, adding that only 17 law school deans out of nearly 200 in the country served longer than he had at the time of his announcement.

He taught mediation, evidence, trial practice, ethics and online courses in e-discovery and evidence at Cumberland.