In the spring of 2026, lawyers and advocates gathered in Victoria, British Columbia, to witness the first sitting of a newly constituted regulatory board that would govern their profession. The board chamber held 17 directors arranged in a configuration that would have been unrecognizable to practitioners from even a generation earlier: 5 elected by lawyers, 2 elected by notaries, 2 regulated paralegals, 3 appointed by the Lieutenant Governor in Council, and 5 appointed through a merit-based process that drew from outside the profession entirely. The incumbent legal profession regulator, which had governed the bar for over a century, had been dissolved and replaced by Legal Professions British Columbia, a unified body whose composition reflected a fundamental reimagining of what self-governance means when a profession serves a public function. A provincial trial lawyers' association, watching these proceedings with alarm, was already preparing materials for the Supreme Court of British Columbia, arguing that this legislative restructuring had gone too far, that the new board composition violated constitutional principles protecting associational autonomy and the independence of the legal profession itself. To understand why this composition sparked such controversy, and to appreciate the legal principles that would govern its resolution, one must trace the historical arc of professional self-governance as it developed in British Columbia and across the common law world.