Allegra received her Ph.D. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford and her J.D. from Yale Law School. After law school, Allegra clerked for the Honorable M. Margaret McKeown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and served as an Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellow providing pro bono representation to immigrants detained at the California-Mexico border. As a Liman Fellow, Allegra also conducted research on the intersections of U.S. criminal and immigration policies. 

Allegra’s Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Exporting U.S. Criminal Justice: Crime, Development, and Empire After the Cold War, addressed the globalization of U.S. criminal procedural and transnational crime control models. In her dissertation, she systematically examined the range of U.S. government programs engaged in foreign criminal justice reform and the functions these programs fulfilled in terms of fashioning a regime for global governance and neoliberal restructuring during the 1990s and beyond.

At Stanford, Allegra worked to revise and publish her dissertation manuscript and continued her research on the criminalization of migration policy and criminal justice and development.