Anita Allen, PhD, JD is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy. A graduate of Harvard Law with a PhD from the University of Michigan in Philosophy, Allen is internationally renowned as an expert on philosophical dimensions of privacy and data protection law, ethics, bioethics, legal philosophy, women’s rights, and faculty diversity in higher education. She was Penn’s Vice Provost for Faculty from 2013-2020.
Allen is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Law Institute, the American Philosophical Society, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018-2019, she served as President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. From 2010 to 2017, Allen served on President Obama’s Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She has served on the faculty of the School of Criticism and Theory, for which she is an advisor, and served a two-year term as an Associate of the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center (2016-2018). Allen has been a visiting Professor at Tel Aviv University, Waseda University, Villanova University, Harvard Law, and Yale Law, and she is a Law and Public Affairs Fellow at Princeton.
Allen was awarded an honorary doctorate from Tilburg University in 2019 and from Wooster College in 2021. She was awarded the 2021 Philip L. Quinn Prize for service to philosophy and philosophers by the American Philosophical Association, the 2022 Founder’s Award by the Hastings Center for service to bioethics, and the 2022 Privacy Award of the Berkeley Law and Technology Center for groundbreaking contributions to privacy and data protection law.
