To indicate an exemplar or someone well-respected within their own group or occupation, sometimes you see expressions like "man's man" or "lawyer's lawyer." Is there a name for this construction?
This isn't to be confused with someone who provides a service serving another in the same profession, like a lawyer defending another who's been sued.
Some examples of the expression:
Dennis Drabelle in the Washington Post:
Enter Jack Tobin, a former Miami defense lawyer who made so much money “defending insurance companies in personal injury actions” that he retired early … As the title of James Sheehan’s engaging thriller makes clear, Jack is a “lawyer’s lawyer,” and the case against the convict, Thomas Felton, cries out for a second look.
Imran Amed in The Business of Fashion:
As I later learned, Peter was a real editor’s editor, having mentored and trained writers who would become key staffers at some of New York’s most important and respected media organisations, from The New Yorker to The New York Times.
Gregory P. Kane in The Baltimore Sun:
Detective Brenda Leigh Higgs, a 15-year veteran, called Chief Johnson "a policeman's policeman" who "hasn't forgotten what it's like to be a policeman on the street."
Best Answer
According to "Construction Grammar" (schema-based grammar), they are a type of constructional idiom [X's X]. Their concreteness level is almost abstract because they are not that lexically specified.
From the book "Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics: General papers" edited by Mike Darnell:
Another explanation from the book "The Reality of Linguistic Rules" By Susan D. Lima, Roberta Corrigan, Gregory K. Iverson:
They can also be a representation of formal (schematic) idiom.
From the article "Language and Cognition II Construction Grammar" by Prof. Holger Diessel:
They fall under "genitive compounds" (descriptive genitives) also. So it can be called an "idiomatic genitive compound" as well.
Here is another passage along with the description of "constructional idiom": (from the book "The Grammar of Words: An Introduction to Linguistic Morphology By Geert Booij"