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.”