Johnny Derogene ’19 Honored with American College of Employee Benefits Counsel Alvin D. Lurie Memorial Award
Johnny Derogene ’19 recently received the American College of Employee Benefits Counsel’s Alvin D. Lurie Memorial Award. The award is one of two prizes in the ACEBC’s annual writing competition for law students to encourage them to learn about employee benefits.
Derogene’s paper, “Does the Burden of Proof in ERISA Section 510 and ADEA Cases Need Recalibration?” was written in Adjunct Professor Diane Soubly’s Employee Benefits Litigation course last spring. The paper will be published in the ABA Journal of Labor and Employment Law.
Derogene, who graduated from Chicago-Kent in May with his J.D. and additional certifications in Litigation and Alternative Dispute Resolution and a certificate in Labor and Employment Law, is currently doing a one-year fellowship with the AFL-CIO’s legal department in Washington, D.C. Each year the AFL-CIO’s legal department awards only one fellowship to a graduating law student or a recent judicial law clerk. He is the first student from Chicago-Kent to be awarded this fellowship.
During law school, Derogene served as a student editor for Chicago-Kent’s Illinois Public Employee Relations Report, as an executive associate editor for the Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property, and as an associate editor for the Chicago-Kent Journal of International and Comparative Law. He earned a CALI Award for the highest grade in his Labor Law Externship class, and he is a mentor with the Black Law Students Association’s 1L student mentorship program.
After the fellowship he would like to join a union as an assistant general counsel or a law firm as an associate attorney to continue advocating for workers’ rights.
