Sun Huei-min, 2012, Institutional Transplantation: Chinese Lawyers in Republican Shanghai (1912-1937), 412 pages, Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica.

This book examines the development of Western-style Chinese lawyers in early Republican Shanghai. It explores how various political and social forces wrestled and negotiated with one another to ensure the legal basis for the very existence of lawyers and to shape regulations of legal practice. The introduction of Western-style lawyers also changed existing concepts of occupations or professions, with increasing numbers of people measuring the status of an occupation by how much specialized knowledge its practitioners had to learn. The scattered and self-employed working style of professional workers made them a unique occupational category, that is, members of the so-called ziyou zhiye (free professions). In order to strengthen its control of the “free” professional workers, the authorities forced Chinese lawyers to organize bar associations, yet at the same time these groups, and especially the Shanghai Bar Association, fostered a sense of community among lawyers and became a key channel for promoting their professional rights.