“The Future of Professional Advice,” Claudia Haupt

Technological innovation in the professional setting occurs in a densely regulated space dominated by knowledge asymmetries and social relationships based on trust. The professional relationship is a specific kind of social relationship governed by a legal framework of professional advice-giving. Traditionally, this legal framework assumes interactions between human actors, and it is designed to protect certain values associated with human-to-human professional advice-giving. Adopting technological innovation can challenge those previous assumptions about human relationships. The key task for regulatory responses to technological change is to ensure that the values that define the human relationships continue to be served. Novel forms of professional advice-giving involving various types of technologies necessarily raise enduring questions about the nature of the professional relationship. The professional relationship and its values, rather than the introduction of new technology, should be at the center of regulatory attention. This shift in perspective does not lose sight of the speed and scale of innovation, nor does it negate the possibility that new regulatory approaches may be necessary, but it does question the impulse to see everything as new and different, and thus in need of entirely new and different forms of regulation. I will focus on the legal mechanisms and ethical values underlying the professional relationship to emphasize continuity where technological innovation suggests disruption. 

Claudia Haupt is a visiting professor of law at Yale Law School and professor of law and political science at Northeastern University School of Law. Haupt’s current research is situated at the intersection of the First Amendment, health law and torts in the context of professional speech. Her further research interests include constitutional law and comparative constitutional law as well as law and technology.

Prior to joining Northeastern, Haupt was a resident fellow with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where she continues to be an affiliate fellow, and a research fellow with the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy at Yale Law School. She has also held an appointment as associate-in-law at Columbia Law School and, prior to that, taught at George Washington University Law School.

Before entering academia, Haupt clerked at the Regional Court of Appeals of Cologne and practiced law at the Cologne office of the law firm of Graf von Westphalen, with a focus in information technology law. She is admitted to practice in Germany and New York. She holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Cologne, a J.S.D. from Columbia Law School, an LL.M. (with highest honors) from George Washington University and her first law degree from the University of Cologne.

Haupt has published articles in journals including the Yale Law Journal, Vanderbilt Law Review, Boston College Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law and George Washington Law Review, among others. Her book, "Religion-State Relations in the United States and Germany: The Quest for Neutrality," was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012.