Online Legal Education in the Macao Special Administrative Region (China)

Abstract

This report covers the development of online legal education in the Macao Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic declared by the World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2020. It describes the overall features of the higher education institutions before it studies the example of the University of Macau, Macao’s only comprehensive public university. Against the backdrop of the overall macroeconomic impact of the pandemic on the Macao economy, the report 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. Based on these findings it concludes with some general remarks about the impact of online legal education against the overall trend of a changing legal profession in the future.

Keywords: legal education, Macau, Macao, China, law school, COVID-19, higher education, law