Should the sentence read: “He can serve those trying to overcome similar obstacles to access the United States legal system.” Or “He can serve those trying to overcome similar obstacles to access the United States’ legal system.”
Also, where do I put the question mark in that last sentence? 
Either is correct, depending on what nuance you want to go for. In the first, “United States” is functioning as a nominal adjective, a noun functioning adjectivally. Compare “dog collar,” which has a slightly different meaning from “dog’s collar.” In the second, “United States’” is a possessive noun. Both mean the legal system of the United States; the second stresses a bit more that you are talking about the particular legal system set up by the United States and changeable by it (or them).
As for the second question, omit the final period, and place the question mark outside the closing quotation marks. (An extreme precisionist would tell you that the middle of your example should read
since the entire utterance is syntactically a single sentence. However, the way you wrote it, breaking your options into two sentences, is quite common modern style, avoiding sesquipedalian sentences at the cost of a bit of grammatical nicety.
What a speedy and thorough reply! Thank you Polycarp. (I love this board).
(I suppose an extreme precisionist wouldn’t have written the sentence with an improperly used colon either.)
I agree with Polycarp about the differences in the two. In my opinion the first option is preferable as the simpler.
Time was when a language purist would have objected to the use of “access” as a verb, insisting that you say “…to gain access to the United States…” As I recall it, “access” and 'impact" were two of the first examples of “verbing*,” the practice of turning nouns into verbs, and many language experts objected strenuously and predicted the end of the world as we know it. But that battle was lost at least thirty years ago.
*Obligatory Calvin and Hobbes quote: “Verbing weirds language.”
For answers to this type of question, you can always check out the project I worked on at Hong Kong University in the late 90s with other pedagogical grammarians, TeleNex.
For a discussion of nouns used as classifiers, click “Adjectives” > “Used to classify nouns” > “Choosing an adjective or noun as classifier” > & “OK”.
“Access” and “impact” are probably among the furthest back examples of verbing that still arouse anyone’s ire. But the process is far, far older than that. English uses “zero derivation” quite commonly, and has always done so. Derivation refers to normal processes in which a derivational suffix changes a word’s part of speech (“bag” to “baggy”, for instance) - except that in zero derivation, that suffix is zero: that is, the word is simply used as a different part of speech. That’s a very long-standing phenomenon in English. It’s not by any means a modern trend. There’s tons of situations like that, in which a word can be a noun or a verb: “a play” versus “to play”; “a hunt” versus “to hunt”. And so on ad infinitum.
What’s really being decried when people complain about verbing of words like “impact” is the obnoxious style of speech used by some businesspeople, which tends to not only over-use zero derivation but also other forms of derivation, creating jargony nonwords like “paradigmize”. For examples, another comic to examine would be Dilbert.
There’s also the tendency to use intransitive verbs (or, to be more precise, verbs which typically are used in an intransitive way - i.e. without a direct object) as transitive. Examples are ‘grow’ (also largely business-speak), as in “We’re aiming to grow our business this year”, where hitherto the transitive use of the verb has been largely limited to plants.
On the other hand, I’m still coming to terms with “Enjoy!”, used intransitively, a usage I noticed the other day in, I think, Dirty Harry, filmed in around 1970, which aleretd me to the fact that it’s been around in the States, at any rate, for longer than I thought. Here we have a verb that is typically used transitively being used intransitively. Will we ever have “Like!”, I wonder?
What’s really being decried when people complain about verbing of words like “impact” is the obnoxious style of speech used by some businesspeople, which tends to not only over-use zero derivation but also other forms of derivation, creating jargony nonwords like “paradigmize”. For examples, another comic to examine would be Dilbert.
Is “jargony” a non-word ? Don’t find it in OED…
Yes, but when business people do it, they’re using buzzwords, whereas when I do it, it’s amusing and disarmingly casual, and demonstrates my irrepressible joie de vivre.
I looked up “non-word” in two unabridged dictionaries. In one, it’s not listed, and in the other it’s listed as “nonword”. So I suspect that “non-word” may be a nonword by the same criterion.
Very true. I think probably we will, as our language continues to evolve.
Love,
Poly 
I’m not sure why that one annoys me so much, but it feels really ungrammatical to me in phrases like “grow the economy”, even though the transitive use as with plants is, like you say, perfectly ordinary. I suspect it relates to the semantic difference between the “farm” usage, which is transitive, and the “increase in size” usage, which used to be intransitive. I think I have two separate lexical entries for “grow”.
Back to the OP, let’s try another country. Does the same hold true for:
People’s Republic of China legal system
vs.
People’s Republic of China’s legal system ?
The first one sounds odd to me. Of course it would be infinitely more natural to just use the adjective and say Chinese legal system. But, by the same token the OP could have said the American legal system.
Thoughts?
I personally dislike multiple possessives, like “my mother’s brother’s car” or the theme park Paramount’s King’s Dominion, and do my best to avoid them. So I’d use your suggestion of the “Chinese legal system” or go for “the legal system of the People’s Republic of China.”
If you held a gun to my head and made me choose one of the two options you’ve given, I’d take the second.
(Then, as you stood there in mute admiration of my Solomonic choice, I’d knock the gun out of your hand before you could pull the trigger, grab your arm and give you a judo flip, catch the gun in mid-air, and stand over you triumphantly, crying, “Ha-ha! Let that be a lesson to you! Never try to force commasense into unpleasant usage choices!”)
Oh please. That’s unpossible!
I suspect that verbing has been going on a long time. When I was growing up, the bete noire was “contact”, which wouldn’t even be noticed today. It’s what comes of not having a language academy. Or as my son says, “It’s a living language.”
Ha! I shall sic Lincoln’s doctor’s dog on you! 
This question can be answered along the same lines as given above, but in all probability the drafter would write something like “the legal system of the People’s Republic of China (hereafter ‘the PRC legal system’)”. That’s what I would do, anyway, and that’s the sort of thing I have to do for a living.
The really interesting thing around here is the different image that Red China is trying to give to the world, and the attention it’s paying to its PR. I had occasion to look up my company’s 1997 Annual Report recently, and in that I found repeated references to the company’s “mainland PRC operations”. Interestingly, even in the first use the abbreviation was used.
Now this was obviously done because of the perceived need not to draw attention to the communistic, one-party, authoritarian images conjured up by “People’s Republic”, which puts the reader immediately in mind of such regimes as the German “Democratic Republic”, and more locally (for us), the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea”, where the tautologous use of ‘democratic’ and ‘people’s’ so blatantly mocks the truth.
So, “People’s Republic of China” has, in fact, been ‘out’ for a long time. (If you hear a reporter, or reportee, use it on the BBC World Service, say, you can be sure that they are using it deliberately both to indicate their stance towards the regime and to rile the ruling classes).
Interestingly, the formulation that succeeded “mainland PRC”, viz. “mainland China” (where the ‘republic’ bit is sacrificed because of the perceived need to ditch the ‘people’s’ [i.e. Communist] bit), has itself given way - after a very brief tenure - to “China mainland”, which is vaguer and less geographic - and therefore less (geo-)political too.
The penchant for vagueness and de-communization of Chinese newspeak is leading, at the more local level, to all sorts of weird and wonderful formulations (it’s almost as if all the shoe-shiners-in-chief are competing with each other to come up with the definitive meaningless agglomeration of words that gives no indication, leaves no trace of the reality of the one-party communist state). Thus, we have advanced from “Hong Kong and Guangdong” via a brief stopover at the “Pearl River Delta” to the “Pan Pearl River Delta”. “Pan” is the key here, being shorthand for ‘international’, or I should say ‘global’, which is the current word du jour for what used to be called ‘multinational’ - a word long since discredited and placed on the PR man’s lexical rubbish dump by the ‘greenies’. Interestingly, the PR gurus have learned from their enemy (Sun Tzu would approve), and ‘global’ is now commonly combined with ‘village’ to give a romantic spin to a most unromantic process.
I agree that both are correct, but I’d like to point out a critical subtlety.
As Polycarp points out, with no apostrophe, “United States” is functioning as a nominal adjective (or, as I would call it, an attributive nominal…). Note the parallels:
to access the [united states] legal system
to access the [china] legal system
to access the [france] legal system
to access the [italy] legal system
to access the [mexico] legal system
But critically, in the second, it is “the United States’” that is functioning as a possessive noun (or as I would call it, a possessive determiner). How do I know this? Because these are all bad:
*to access the [china’s] legal system
*to access the [france’s] legal system
*to access the [italy’s] legal system
*to access the [mexico’s] legal system
and therefore:
*to access the [united states’] legal system
Whereas these are all good:
to access [china’s] legal system
to access [france’s] legal system
to access [italy’s] legal system
to access [mexico’s] legal system
and therefore:
to access [the united states’] legal system
But the bottom line is this:
Pretend, for a moment, that your sentence is about China.
—If your intended meaning was “to access the china legal system” (which is maybe a little weird, but IMO, okay), then do not use the apostrophe.
—If, on the other hand, your intended meaning was “to access china’s legal system” (as it probably was, since this sounds more natural, at least to me), then use the apostrophe.
—It took me longer than I care to admit to figure this out. So whether or not you use the apostrophe, people are going to parse the sentence the way they are going to parse it, and the most naturally parsing, I think, is “china’s legal system” (i.e. apostrophe present) rather than “the china legal system” (i.e. no apostrophe), so that’s the one that most people will probably mentally go with.
Relieved you didn’t brandish your Excalibur ! 