 Lawyers can be regulated exclusively by an independent judiciary and its subordinate institutions that is a self-regulating legal profession, or whether lawyers should be subject to supervision by the Ministry of Justice in the executive branch. And this is the difference between countries.
In most civil law countries, the government has traditionally exercised tight control over the legal profession in order to assure a steady supply of loyal judges and bureaucrats. Thus lawyers were expected first and leading to serve the state and the availability of counsel for private litigants was a late addition. But many countries have own opinion to this. Some civil law countries have partly self-regulating professions. Thus there the Ministry of Justice is the sole issuer of licenses, and makes its own independent re-evaluation of a lawyer's fitness to practice after a lawyer has been expelled from the Advocates' Association.
Of all the civil law countries, Communist countries historically went the farthest towards total state control, with all Communist lawyers forced to practice in collectives by the mid-1950s.
Common law lawyers have traditionally regulated themselves through institutions where the impact of non-lawyers, if any, was feeble and indirect. And such institutions have been traditionally dominated by private practitioners who opposed strong state control of the profession on the grounds that it would endanger the ability of lawyers to zealously and competently advocate their clients' causes in the adversarial system of justice.
Nevertheless, the idea of the self-regulating profession has been criticized as a sham which serves to legitimize the professional monopoly while protecting the profession from public inspection. By the way, disciplinary mechanisms have been surprisingly unsuccessful, and penalties have been light or absent.
| 
