the approval of the parliament, and initiating a wave of fundamental restructuring and overhauling reforms with the aid of French judicial experts. By April 1927 Iran had 600 newly appointed judges in Tehran. Davar subsequently attempted to expand the new system into other cities of Iran through a programme involving training of 250 judges. Reza Shah represented his legal reforms as "tentative experiments" and allowed the religious judges to keep their courts for matters such as inheritance. In 1936, however, the new system was made permanent and the religious courts were abolished. However, there were still sharia courts that ruled on issues of family and inheritance up to the Islamic Revolution (working alongside secular ones). Some aspects of sharia law were also unofficially retained in criminal law, for example compensation was still unofficially given in a similar manner to blood money, in exchange for pardoning a murder death sentence in some cases. The legal profession According to Banakar and Ziaee, the history of the Iranian Bar Association (Kānūn-e Vūkalā-yeh Dādgūstarī) “can be traced back to the period after the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, when a modern legal system was established in Iran. The IBA was founded in 1915 and organised under the supervision of the judicial system until 1953, when it was granted legal personality. It operated as an independent civil society organisation for the next twenty-seven years, until it was closed in 1980 by the revolutionary government and its ranks and files were purged. It was reopened in 1991 under the control of the Head of the Judiciary and regained some of its independence in 1997 when President Khatami […] won the general election. Since then, the numbers of lawyers have grown steadily to an estimated 60,000, and perhaps most significantly a large number of women have passed the Bar and joined the legal profession”. “Since the 1979 Revolution, the IBA has been struggling to maintain its independence from the judiciary. As part of this conflict, a new body of lawyers was created by the Iranian government in 2001 and 'authorized to present cases in court' under Article 187 of the Law of Third Economic, Social and Cultural Development Plan (adopted in May 2000). […] This group, whose membership in 2014 was estimated to exceed 20,000, is officially known as the Legal Advisors of the Judiciary.” Islamic Republic In 1979 the secular, westernizing Pahlavi Dynasty was overthrown and replaced by