Abstract
The Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China holds a unique position in the world not only due to its legal system, but also in historic, cultural, linguistic and economic terms. These unique characteristics provide great opportunities for the economic development but also pose serious challenges in the area of legal education and training of future lawyers particularly in a rapidly changing local, regional and global context.
The overview of the legal profession in Macao reveals an innate link between university-level and professional legal education and the conditions for seeking license as a legal practitioner in the Macao SAR. The significance of legal education in Macao law manifests not only in the minimum educational qualification requirements for the entry into the profession but also for the entry into the pupillage. Relevantly, although one of the basic qualification requirements for the entry transcends law degrees obtained locally, any foreign law degree through which the entry is sought should be locally recognized under the relevant regulations and be supplemented with an adaptation course in the local law.
The paper traces the development of online legal education in the Macao SAR in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2020. It summarizes the overall features of the higher education institutions before it studies the example of the University of Macau (UM), Macao’s only comprehensive public university. Against the backdrop of the overall macroeconomic impact of the pandemic on the Macao economy, the paper shows what steps had been undertaken before the outbreak of the pandemic and how these had helped to provide exclusively online or hybrid classes during the pandemic. The shift to online teaching after the outbreak of the pandemic also quickly transformed the format of legal education, which was focused more on classroom teaching and more reluctant to make ample use of the available e-learning tools. As was shown from the past experiences with online legal education at UM, several such electronic learning tools were encouraged to foster out-of-class engagement of the students.
Overall, the pandemic had an indirect positive effect on the familiarity of staff and students with the various new learning technologies. These positive effects notwithstanding, it is also important to consider the wider context of the use of modern educational technologies, such as notably the common mental health problems related to mobile phone addiction or problematic internet use. Equally, it is important to follow the opinion of users of online education. Last but not least, it is because of the nature of law, which is strongly rooted in human interactions that direct student-teacher contact but also peer-to-peer learning, facilitated not only by classroom teaching but also other personal contacts on the university campus play a crucial role in the education and formation of future lawyers. For these reasons, it is also important to closely align the debate about the use of modern education technologies with the debate about the future material content of legal education.
Biography
Rostam J. Neuwirth is Professor of Law and Head of the Department of Global Legal Studies at the Faculty of Law of the University of Macau. He received his PhD degree from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence (Italy), and also holds a Master’s degree in Law (LL.M.) from the Faculty of Law of McGill University in Montreal (Canada). As an undergraduate he studied at the University of Graz (Austria) and the Université d’Auvergne (France). His research interests focus on international economic law and broader contemporary global legal problems by exploring the intrinsic linkages between law, language, cognition, art, culture, society, and technology.
Muruga P. Rawaswamy is associate professor at the University of Macau, Faculty of Law, where he also serves as Programme Coordinator of Service Teaching and as member of the Information and Education Technology Committee. He received his PhD degree from the University of Hong Kong, and also holds a Master’s degree in Law (M.Phil.) from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi (India). His current research covers challenges in implementing information technology in e-business and the evolution of international norms, protection of intellectual property rights in internet transactions, and legal environment for e-commerce in East Asia.
Alexandr Svetlicinii is associate professor at the University of Macau, Faculty of Law, where he also serves as Programme Coordinator of the Master of International Business Law in English Language. He received his PhD degree from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence (Italy), and also holds a Master’s degree in Law (LL.M.) from the Central European University in Budapest (Hungary). Prior to joining the University of Macau, Dr. Svetlicinii was a senior researcher at the Jean Monnet Chair of European Law at the Tallinn Law School, Tallinn University of Technology, in Estonia. His research interests focus on competition law and international economic law.