A nationwide judicial system in Iran was first implemented and established by Abdolhossein Teymourtash under Reza Shah, with further changes during the second Pahlavi era.

[1] According to one scholar, the administration of justice in Islamic Iran has been until recent times a loosely sewn and frequently resewn patchwork of conflicting authority in which the different and sometimes conflicting sources for Islamic law—the jurists, the actual judges, and the non-Islamic law officials of the king - disputed with each other over the scope of their jurisdictions.

"Thirteen centuries of Islamic—more particularly Shiah—tradition" called for jurists to base decisions on their legal training as it applied to the situation being judged.

Major events marking the judicial history of Iran during the modern era include the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, which gave the country its first Constitution and Bill of Rights, the fall of the Qajars and the rise of the Pahlavi Dynasty in the 1920s, when accession to a modern judicial organisation became one of Iran's greatest challenges, and the Islamic Revolution.

As European military and technological power began to be felt in 19th century Iran, Westerners insisted on special treatment in Iranian courts.

[4] Under the secularist reign of Reza Shah many changes were made in Iran's judicial system, and the establishment of a fixed written law with appeals courts was one of them.

[5] Reza Shah represented his legal reforms as "tentative experiments" and allowed the religious judges to keep their courts for matters such as inheritance.

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.

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.

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).

[8] While the revolution did not dismantle the Pahlavi judiciary in its entirety, it replaced secular-trained jurists "with seminary-educated ones, and codified more features of the sharia into state laws—especially the Law of Retribution.

He is responsible for the "establishment of the organizational structure" of the judicial system; "drafting judiciary bills" for Parliament; hiring, firing, promoting and assigning judges.