The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that the board of officers has selected Anita Allen (University of Pennsylvania) as the recipient of the 2021 Philip L. Quinn Prize, the APA’s highest honor for service to the profession.
The prize memorializes Philip L. Quinn, a former president of the APA Central Division and former chair of the APA board of officers. This prize, which includes a prize check of $2,500 and an engraved plaque, is given annually by the APA board of officers in recognition of service to philosophy and philosophers, broadly construed.
Dominic McIver Lopes, chair of the APA board of officers, said, “Anita Allen once remarked in an interview that she’s ‘committed to helping to improve the discipline.’ Nobody has surpassed her in that regard. She famously challenged us to reflect upon what we have to offer those we’ve excluded and hope to include, and she’s championed inclusion at every opportunity. She pioneered the philosophy of privacy, balancing it against accountability and equity. She’s taken the message of philosophy to the airwaves, even appearing on 60 Minutes. And she has served professionally, at the highest levels, as President of the APA Eastern Division, as chair of the board of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and as a member of President Barack Obama’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. She holds two honorary doctorates and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In awarding her the 2021 Philip L. Quinn Prize, the APA celebrates Professor Anita Allen for her extraordinary blend of scholarship and leadership.”
Anita L. Allen is the Henry R. Silverman Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was Vice Provost for Faculty from 2013–2020. At Penn she is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition, the Warren Center for Network & Data Sciences, and a Senior Fellow of the Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics. A graduate of Harvard Law School with a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Michigan, Allen is an expert on privacy and data protection law, bioethics, and public philosophy.
Currently chair of the Board of Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington D.C., 2020–2022, in June 2014 she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from EPIC for her pioneering privacy scholarship and advocacy; and for the same accomplishment she was awarded honorary doctorates from Tilburg University in the Netherlands and the College of Wooster in the United States. She has been named among the world’s top 20 philosophers by Academic Influence. Allen was President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association (2018–19), the first African American woman in history to be so-named. An elected member of the American Law Institute and the National Academy of Medicine, she is a former member of the National Academies’ Forum on Cyber Resilience. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Allen served under President Obama as a member of the National Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. Allen also has served on numerous editorial, advisory, and non-profit boards including the American Society for Political and Legal Philosophy, the Association of American Law Schools, the Association for Practical and Professional Ethics, the Hastings Center, and the National Constitution Center. Allen has been a full-time visiting professor at, among others, Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, Villanova Law School, Waseda Law School (Tokyo), and Tel Aviv Buchman Law School.
Allen is co-author of Privacy Law and Society (2016), a comprehensive textbook in the field. Allen’s other books about data protection, values and contemporary life include Unpopular Privacy: What Must We Hide (2011); The New Ethics: A Guided Tour of the 21st Century Moral Landscape (2004), Why Privacy Isn’t Everything (2003), and Uneasy Access: Privacy for Women in a Free Society. Allen, who has written more than 120 scholarly articles, has also contributed and been featured in popular magazines and blogs, including “The Stone” and “What It’s Like to be a Philosopher,” and appeared on numerous television and radio programs, and lectured on privacy in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.
