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Anita L. Allen (1953-  ) is a legal scholar, philosopher and public intellectual in the United States. She was one of the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Philosophy; the first such woman to also earn a J.D. law degree. She is known as a defender of the right to privacy, and the rights of women, children and disadvantaged minorities. Allen has a national and international reputation as a scholar, but is also a newspaper columnist and frequent news commnetator. Allen is sometimes referred to as Anita L. Allen-Castellitto. She married attorney Paul Castellitto in 1985 and raised two children.

Childhood and Education
One of six children, Allen was born Anita Lafrance Allen in Fort Worden, Washington in 1953 to Carrie Mae Cloud Allen and Grover Cleveland Allen, both natives of Atlanta, Georgia. Seeking wider opportunitis than were available for poor African Americans at the time, her father made a career in the racially integrated U.S. army. He served in both the Korean and Viet-nam wars. Allen's mother was a life-long homemaker and volunteer.

Allen developed a fondness for reading and writing as a young girl. Allen spent her childhood living on and near U.S. army bases. She attended kindergarten while living at Fort McClellan, Alabama; elementary school while living at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii; and high school while living near Fort Benning, Georgia. Her family lived at the Indiana Ammunition Plant in Jeffersonville, Indiana during her college years.

Allen attended the then recently racially integrated Baker High School in Columbus, Georgia (1968-1970), excelling in her studies and graduating in only three years. She entered New College, Sarasota, Florida, on a scholarship in 1970, graduating in 1974. Allen’s college studies took her to Italy and Germany for a year. Majoring in languages, literature and philosophy, she wrote a senior thesis on the early 20th century philosopher and exponent of Logical Positivism, Rudolf Carnap.

After college, Allen obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor Michigan. A full fellowship from the Ford Foundation made graduate school affordable. Allen wrote a doctoral thesis under the direction of the utilitarian moral philosopher, Richard Brandt. Her dissertation focused on John Lockes' and Thomas Hobbes' theories of education and parental authority. Allen completed her dissertation in 1979 and in 1980 became the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan.

Professor and Lawyer
Allen's professional career in academia began in 1978, when she took a teaching post as in Instructor in the Department of History and Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She was 25 years old. For a two years Allen taught ethics and logic at Carnegie Mellon. She was among the youngest members of the faculty and one of the school’s first African American women professors.

Disenchanted with teaching required introductory philosophy courses, Allen decided to expand her professional options by attending law school. Between teaching at Carnegie-Mellon and law school, she spent more than a year working in Washington, D.C., as a program officer under the Intergovernmental Personnel Act at the National Endowment for the Humanities. While in Washington, she volunteered for attorney Elaine Jones at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

While in Washington, Allen met former civil rights attorney and Harvard law professor Derrick Bell. Impressed by Professor Bell and critical legal sudies scholar encountered through her work in Washington, Allen chose to attend Harvard Law School for her J.D. degree. She attended Harvard from 1981 to 1984, making ends meet by working as a teaching assistant for Professors Michael Sandel, Robert Nozick, Sissela Bok and Charles Fried. Allen’s Harvard years were emotionally turbulent. In 1982 she married and then quickly divorced a New York based-artist, Michael Kelly Williams.

After graduating from Harvard Law School Allen passed the New York and Pennsylvania bars. Allen briefly practiced corporate law in the litigation department at Cravath, Swaine & Moore, a prominent New York Law firm. She worked for Paul Dodyk and Davied Boies. Corporate law on Wall Street in the era of mergers and acquisitions was far removed from Allen’s intellectual interests.

Allen left New York and took a job teaching at the University of Pittsburgh Law School in September 1985. She moved on to Georgetown University Law School in 1988, where she received tenure and from 1996 to 1998 served as Dean of Research and Scholarship. Allen joined the law faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. Over the years Allen took on additional appointments at Penn in Philosophy, Bioethics, Women Studies and Africana Studies. In 2005 Allen was appointed to the Henry R. Silverman Professorship of Law, a chair named in honor of a New York businessman and philanthropist.

Allen served as a visiting professor at Harvard (1990-91), Yale (2001-2002)and Princeton (2003-2004). She was the first recipient of the Reuschlein chair at Villanova Law School in 1998, and was a visiting professor at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan in 2008.

Scholar and Public Intellectual
Allen has published books on the right to privacy and more than a hundred articles. Her distinctive work on privacy, women and identity is well-known among feminist philosophers in the United States. Her book, Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society (1988), was the first sole authored book on the moral and legal right to privacy by any U.S. philosopher. The meaning and definition of privacy, abortion, prostitution and intimacy were among the book's major topics. A subsequent book, Why Privacy Isn’t Everything (2003), continued Allen’s exploration of privacy themes from feminist and African American perspectives. In discussions of lying, interracial marriage, open adoption, health privacy, and religion, Allen explored what it means to respect privacy but take mandates of accountability to others seriously. Allen’s articles on reproductive rights, medical confidentiality and genetic privacy are frequently cited. Her legal textbook, Privacy Law and Society (2007), is one of only a few in the field. Allen’s popular press book, The New Ethics (Miramax Books/Harper Collins) was named a top nonfiction book of 2004 by Publisher’s Weekly.

Allen’s newspaper column about ethics, published under the moniker, "The Moralist," began appearing in the Newark Star Ledger in 2005. Anita served as a television commentator on constitutional abortion rights for CNN and CBS in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2005 she was a featured regular on the MSNBC television program, The Ethical Edge. In 2006 she began contributing ethics advice to O, the Ophrah Magazine. Allen frequently appears on public television and radio, discussing topics such as nanotechnology, personal ethics, social networking, and data security breaches.

In addition to serving as a consultant to lawyers and businesses, Allen has been active as a member of the Board of Directors of not for profit organizations. She has served on the Boards of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, the Hastings Center, the Maternity Care Coalition, the Elecatronic Privacy Information Center, Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington and the West Philadelphia Alliance for Children.