Experiences in Bilingual Legal Education: The Case of Macau SAR’s Chinese–Portuguese Bachelor of Law

In July 1997, the British colony of Hong Kong was returned to the People's Republic of China ("PRC"). It became a Special Administrative Region ("SAR") of the PRC in accordance with the concept of "one country, two systems" embodied by the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984. The constitutional instrument of Hong Kong's new legal and political system is the Basic Law of the SAR of Hong Kong, enacted by the National People's Congress of the PRC and effective as of July 1997. Under colonial rule, Hong Kong inherited a British-style legal system. English common law formed the foundation, and the British tradition of the Rule of law and the independence of the judiciary were transplanted to Hong Kong. In the post-War era, the people of Hong Kong enjoyed relatively more civil liberties than did the people of mainland China and Taiwan. Since the signing of the Sino-British Joint Declaration in 1984, the legal system of Hong Kong was further liberalized, and the political system partially democratized. Following the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, the British colonial government introduced into Hong Kong's constitution a Bill of Rights for the purpose of boosting residents' confidence in Hong Kong's future. Since the enactment of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights, the courts of Hong Kong have developed a solid body of case law on the protection of human rights, and have begun to exercise the power of judicial review of legislation. The era of constitutional adjudication thus began in Hong Kong. After the establishment of the SAR of Hong Kong in 1997, the judiciary faced dual challenges of finding a place in the new constitutional order of "one country, two systems" and leading Hong Kong forward in its legal and constitutional development. Delicate issues of Hong Kong's constitutional relationship with the central government in Beijing have arisen, which often underscore the contradiction between the Communist Party-led legal system in mainland China and the tradition of judicial independence and the Rule of law in Hong Kong. At the same time, the courts of Hong Kong have had to tackle the classic constitutional problem of trying to work out the appropriate balance between civil liberties on the one hand and public order and communitarian values on the other hand. This article will review and evaluate how the Hong Kong courts have responded to these challenges.

Objective: This research aims to analyze and assess the legal and regulatory system for urban environmental management in Algeria and the penalty for violating it, with a particular focus on the various factors and challenges affecting the urban environment, and explore the mechanisms and tools of environmental management. Theoretical Framework: The study encompasses various concepts and principles related to urban environmental management, legal frameworks, and governance. It provides a foundation for understanding the relationship between urban development, environmental issues, and the legal and regulatory mechanisms in Algeria. Methodology: Descriptive and analytical approaches will be adopted. The descriptive approach focuses on the laws that address the issue, while the analytical one clarifies the role of relevant laws in defining the administrative management of cities. In this context, we will limit the scope of the study to highlighting the factors and tools of environmental management and highlighting the key issues affecting the urban environment, as well as examining the development of legal, protective and regulatory systems for urban environmental management in. Results and Discussion: Despite the existence of an advanced legal system, shortcomings in its implementation have resulted in genuine obstacles to creating urban settlements or developing old ones. This situation is attributed to political, social, and economic factors, as well as weak oversight and lax enforcement of laws related to urban planning. Consequently, this has resulted in cities that fail to meet citizens' service needs, highlighting the urgent need to reassess the regulations governing the urban environment and the methods of their implementation. Research Implications: Environmental studies of urban settlements (architecture and cities) and the legal system regulating them are of great importance, especially since the efforts of the Algerian state in this field are evident. However, the real issue often arises in the implementation of the law, leading to actual crises in the demographic growth of cities in relation to a clean and healthy urban environment. Therefore, this study aims to outline the legal and regulatory framework for managing the urban environment in Algeria, the penalties for violations, and to describe and evaluate it. Originality/Value: The study of the urban environment from a legal and regulatory perspective is limited, which has prompted us to examine this topic to demonstrate the legal and regulatory framework for managing the urban environment in Algeria and the penalties for its violations. Consequently, this research is considered new in its field.

"Apres Moi Le Deluge"? Judicial Review in Hong Kong Since Britain Relinquished Sovereignty

Civil law' is the basic (jiben) law used to regulate relations in a commodity economy. In the legal system of the People's Republic of China (PRC) civil law occupies a critical position. Chinese law is divided into three levels: fundamental (genben) law, basic (iben) law, and specifically enacted (danxing) law. The fundamental law is the Constitution, which has the greatest legal effect in the legal system; basic law is law which regulates certain aspects of social relations, and its effect is subordinate to that of the Constitution but superior to special law. Civil law is a basic law which regulates the property and personal relations between equal subjects and assumes the leading role toward the various sorts of special enactments (danxingfagui) and economic regulations (jingjifagui) in the economic sector. On April 12, 1986, the Fourth Session of the Sixth National People's Congress passed the General Principles of Civil Law of the Chinese People's Republic. This not only legislatively established the central position of civil law in the Chinese legal system, but it also symbolized that the construction of Chinese law and democracy had entered a new stage. This article is an exposition of the emergence, characteristics, and role of the General Principles of Civil Law in the PRC.

Part 1 Bilingualism and intelligence. Part 2 Bilingualism and cognitive functioning: divergent and creative thinking bilingualism and divergent thinking bilingualism and an analytic orientation to language Piaget and bilingualism communicative sensitivity the cognitive style of field dependence - independence and bilingualism. Part 3 Bilingual education in Britain and Ireland: types of bilingual education bilingual education in Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales conclusions on Celtic and English bilingual education. Part 4 Bilingual education - the judgement of North American research USA Canada. Part 5 Attitudes and bilingualism: attitude theory, measurement attitude to Welsh - decline with age attitude to Gaelic and Irish - public support and personal scepticism attitude change. Part 6 Bilingualism and motivation: the measurement of motivation overview of bilingualism and motivation integrative and instrumental motivation research in Wales on bilingualism and motivation. Part 7 Theory into practice: the balance theory think tank model the thresholds theory the evolution of a theory concerning the language proficiency of bilinguals. two attitude/motivation models C.B.Paulston's bilingual education theories Spolsky's bilingual education evaluation model the input-output-context-process bilingual education model Cummins' theoretical framework for minority student intervention and empowerment.

Bilingualism and Bilingual Deaf Education, edited by Marc Marschark, Gladys Tang, and Harry Knoors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, 495 pp., hardcover, ISBN 978-0-19-937181-5)THIS BOOK DISCUSSES aspects of bilingualism and bilingual education that directly or indirectly affect education. It offers an overview of research on education that shows evidence of bilingualism among children, focusing on their acquisition of language and bimodal and bilingual processing. The editors state that not enough research has been done on effective education for people and on whether bilingual education could endorse Deaf education.Interestingly, in the book the word deaf is written with a small d, not with a capital D, already placing it in a position that does not assume a Deaf perspective on education. Instead, this usage of lowercase deaf indicates that the book is an aggregation of research that includes studies that use D and others that use d.The book seems to be more general in that it reflects several views of the work produced up to now that does not put forward a consensus view of education.The volume is organized in three parts: (1) a general discussion of Deaf bilingualism; (2) a focused discussion of Deaf educational issues; and (3) a more specific analysis of the bilingual setting in coenrollment environments experienced by children. Each of these three parts includes works by several authors.Part one considers various perspectives on Deaf bilingualism, especially with respect to linguistics, language issues (including bilingual acquisition and bimodal bilingualism), psychosocial development, the relationship between reading and sign language, and signed and spoken language development.The findings presented here indicate that Deaf people leverage interconnected language systems and learn how to use them in forms appropriate for their interlocutors and the relevant communication purposes of any given context. Several of the authors mentioned in this section state that it is crucial to guarantee bimodal/ bilingual development for children inasmuch as language development depends on signed and spoken language access, which will enable children to build self-identity and acquire cultural, linguistic, and cognitive skills. Cross-language interaction and coactivation are also considered, together with the effects of bilingualism on cognitive control and the consequent implications for Deaf education. Also in this first part, several authors discuss the effects of a neurolinguistic perspective, such as the possibility of producing both languages at the same time in code-blending examples from early sign language users, indicating the impact of age on neural systems. These chapters present basic research studies on the characteristics of a bilingual Deaf person.For educational purposes, a number of authors in this first section state that, although the acquisition of sign language seems to be crucial, we still have much to learn about how to design bimodal/ bilingual educational curricula. Several chapters are devoted to childrens reading development.Their authors present research findings that suggest that sign language may have a positive correlation with reading comprehension, but they also present other studies with contradictory results. For children with cochlear implants, research is presented that supports the use of a spoken language with signs cooccurring with speech as the preferred educational approach (rather than a bilingual education model).This controversy about the role of sign language again points out the inconsistency between the chapters regarding the Deaf point of view. Other research in this section presents a perspective of difference, not deficiency, claiming that language plays an important role in Deaf people s lives since they have unique linguistic-communicative experiences at home, at school, and in their general social lives. …

This event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study was designed in such a manner so as to contribute to the present debate on behavioural and functional transfer effects associated with intensive language training. To address this novel issue, we measured professional simultaneous interpreters and control subjects while they performed a non-verbal auditory discrimination task that primarily relies on attention and categorization functions. The fMRI results revealed that the discrimination of the target stimuli was associated with differential blood oxygen level-dependent responses in fronto-parietal regions between the two groups, even though in-scanner behavioural results did not show significant group differences. These findings are in line with previous observations showing the contribution of fronto-parietal regions to auditory attention and categorization functions. Our results imply that language training modulates brain activity in regions involved in the top-down regulation of auditory functions.

The study aimed to determine the efficacy of a Conversational Therapy approach in the treatment of chronic patients with moderately severe non-fluent aphasia. Eight patients completed a six week intensive language training. Every two weeks, each patient received rehabilitation using a different videoclip depicting everyday life. To elicit verbal communication, patients were required to observe each videoclip and to converse about it with the help of an experienced clinician. To measure any significant improvement in speech production all patients were tested before and after treatment. A significant increase in their ability to produce correct informative words (C-Units), verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, as well as closed-class words (pronouns, articles and conjunctions) and well-formed sentences was found after therapy. Such improvement persisted at one week and one month after the end of the treatment. These results suggest that conversational therapy, applied through intensive language training, has a significant efficacy in the recovery of verbal communication in chronic non-fluent aphasic individuals. This approach should be considered for patients with moderately severe non-fluent aphasia, as it enhances not only the ability to use informative language but also its correct use in daily living.

This volume focuses on the conditions of bilingualism and bilingual education across the new global society and on the demands and challenges placed on them by the many features and processes of globalization. The authors examine the intrinsic and complex characteristics of multilingual societies and bilingualism, discuss historical and current issues of multilingualism and language teaching, and present models of bilingual education. The chapters are written in either native American English or in World English styles. This organic linguistic authenticity is a significant feature of the volume, uncommonly found in multilingualism and bilingual education literature.

Intense language training has been found to be more efficient in the rehabilitation of chronic aphasia than treatment spread across time. Intense treatment, however, challenges personnel and financial resources of the health care system. The present study examined, whether laypersons can be trained to apply standardized language training for chronic aphasia with effects comparable to training by experts. Twenty individuals with chronic aphasia participated in the training, Constraint-Induced Aphasia Therapy (CIAT), which comprises communicative language games with increasing level of difficulty in a motivating context for 3 hr/day on 10 consecutive days. Following a random-control design, training was applied either by experienced therapists (n=10) or trained laypersons (n=10). Standardized language assessments revealed significant within-group improvements, however, between-group differences were not present. We conclude that a standardized training program, such as CIAT, can be efficiently accomplished by trained laypersons with results comparable to that of experienced therapists.

Although not much time has elapsed since China resumed the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong, a number of issues and cases have occurred involving Central/SAR relations. Examples are those regarding the legality of the establishment of a provisional legislative council, the issue of revising a number of laws dating back to “bygone dynastic eras,” the adaptation of laws (by replacing such terms and concepts as “British imperial” and “official” with “national”), the issue of the legal status of the Xinhua News Agency HK Branch Office, the issue of whether the director of the Xinhua News Agency HK Branch Office has been constrained by the “Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance,” the Hu Xian [Aw Sian] Incident, and so forth. Among these cases, those which have caused fairly big repercussions are the issue of the legality of the SAR Provisional Legislative Council, the issue of the right of abode in Hong Kong, cases of the desecration of the national flag, the Zhang Ziqiang (Cheung Tze-Keung) Case and the Li Yuhui Case. One of the chief reasons for the emergence of these unique legal issues is that in accordance with the Basic Law, both regions retain their own legal and judicial systems and, in terms of law, “one country, two systems” became “one country two laws [legal systems].” This plus the increasingly close economic, financial, and civil exchanges between the regions have made many legal issues quite complicated. The problems would not exist if “one country one system” or “one country one law” was being implemented. However, as compared to these legal issues, “one country, two systems” is more fundamental and should not be negated because it has given rise to legal problems of one sort or another. On the contrary, such cases and issues ought to be handled in accordance with the “one country, two systems” principle and the Basic Laws. The handling of such cases and problems is also a direct test of the “one country, two systems” principle and the Basic Laws, and the handling of each case has deepened people’s understanding of “one country, two systems” and the Basic Laws.

Objective: This study aims to contribute further discussions on solutions to enhance the quality of the legal system in the context of Vietnam advancing to stage 2 (stage 1 being the quantitative aspect) of the process of perfecting its legal system. Theoretical Framework: This research adopts the ROCCIPI model theory to identify several solutions for improving the Vietnamese legal system within the context of the requirements for building a rule-of-law state in Vietnam, as embodied in Resolution No. 27. Research Methods: This paper employs methods such as the analysis of written laws, document analysis, and comparative analysis. Results and Conclusion: The research results indicate that after prolonged efforts to build a legal system almost from scratch, Vietnam now has a legal framework and procedural system that covers most social relations, gradually replacing arbitrary measures previously imposed by public entities. However, the Vietnamese legal documents system exhibits numerous inadequacies and lacks stability. One of the causes is the involvement of multiple intermediaries in the law-making process, leading to a multi-layered legal system with various procedures (often referred to as "sub-licenses") that interfere with the effectiveness of regulations. Despite modernization efforts, Vietnam's legislative techniques have not significantly improved the quality of legal documents. Therefore, this study proposes solutions focusing on addressing these issues based on the ROCCIPI model approach, which the author believes is suitable for Vietnam's political and legislative realities. Research Implications: This study is set against the backdrop of the Communist Party's continued emphasis on legal formalization, reflecting a consistent policy direction towards building a state that upholds the rule of law. The author agrees that building and perfecting the legal system in any country must begin with an awareness of the law's position and role in social life, from the perspective of the entity controlling and regulating society. Therefore, this research, premised on the consistent guiding capacity of the Communist Party and the State of Vietnam in the legislative process, will discuss ways to progressively perfect the legislative process with strong leadership and constructive roles from these two entities. Originality/Value: Since the promulgation of the Law on Promulgation of Legal Documents in 2008 , issues regarding efficiency, rationality, inflation, and overlap of legal documents have not been resolved. Numerous studies have identified causes, consequences, and proposed legislative solutions to optimize the legislative process and establish a legal life for the documents. The contribution of this study, beginning with a hypothesis about the strong regulatory role of political and social management entities, with an awareness of the law's role in this process, will provide solutions focusing on three aspects of the legislative process: reducing intermediary layers between rules and social life; continuing to emphasize the stability of rules with the central regulatory role of the state; and finally, the techniques of drafting documents, which can be frequently adjusted to meet the two aforementioned objectives.

This study focuses on the application of the “PBL (problem-based learning) + Flipped Classroom” teaching model in bilingual education, aiming to explore its potential to enhance the quality and effectiveness of bilingual teaching. PBL emphasizes learning through the resolution of real-world problems, while the Flipped Classroom advocates that students acquire basic knowledge through self-study before class, dedicating class time to in-depth discussions and practical activities. The integration of these two teaching models in bilingual education aims to stimulate students’ interest in learning, improve their autonomous learning abilities, enhance critical thinking, and foster cross-cultural communication skills. Through literature review, case analysis, and empirical research, this study first examines the current applications and challenges of PBL and the Flipped Classroom in bilingual education. Subsequently, it elaborates on the specific implementation steps of the “PBL + Flipped Classroom” teaching model in bilingual education, including problem design, preview material provision, cooperative learning, classroom activities, and language support. A comparative experiment is then conducted to analyze the impact of this teaching model on students’ learning motivation, academic performance, and cross-cultural communication skills. The results indicate that the “PBL + Flipped Classroom” teaching model significantly improves students’ learning motivation and participation, enhances academic performance, and effectively boosts their cross-cultural communication skills. Furthermore, this model aids in cultivating students’ autonomous learning abilities and critical thinking, providing an innovative and effective approach to bilingual education. This study offers new ideas and insights for the field of bilingual education, which is of great significance for promoting the innovation and development of bilingual teaching models.

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to exemplify a ‘grass-roots’ change based on Dewey's experimental progressive education model employed in the ‘Bridge over the Valley’ bilingual school, a Palestinian-Arab and Jewish school in Israel. In order to identify the progressive ‘approach' underlying this change, the ‘method' that guided the implementation of a bilingual school, it's evaluation and then its dissemination to other schools, we used a qualitative case study method to understand whether John Dewey’s theory of education for peace was able to effect change in Palestinian-Arab and Jewish school education in Israel. The case findings describes the use of the progressive approach of education for peace in the ‘Bridge over the Valley’ bilingual school, as it is expressed in the school’s pedagogy, the implementation of the progressive method and in the accompanying discourse. Reciprocal teacher–child relations are considered an important factor to create fertile conditions for learning. The case findings contribute to our introduction of democratic education in a spatial reality. Underlying this approach stood a pedagogical method and conceptualization for conflict resolution and the opening of a space for empowering dialog for co-existence.

The influence of international laws on the normative systems of domestic legal frameworks, particularly in the field of law, is a critical and interdisciplinary issue that has sparked significant debate and challenges in contemporary times. Within domestic legal systems, obstacles such as prioritizing cultural relativism and favoring specific cultural and legal frameworks hinder the penetration of international laws and regulations into domestic law. Peremptory norms or lawmaking provisions have played a central role in transforming and influencing domestic legal systems. Various components of a cohesive legal and judicial system, as observed in domestic law, are similarly reflected in international legal systems, albeit in different forms. This influence is examined in a concrete manner in the present study. In the Iranian legal system, numerous values from international law have influenced the adoption and modification of both substantive and procedural laws over the years. This issue is analyzed in detail in this article. The primary research question is: What are the effects of the globalization of cyber criminal law on the Iranian legal system? The author's hypothesis posits that the elements of cyber criminal law, as norms or standards of international law, have achieved global recognition. While they may not directly influence constitutional laws, they have notably impacted domestic systems, particularly the cyber criminal laws of various countries. The research methodology is descriptive-analytical. Overall, it can be concluded that domestic legal systems have little choice but to acquiesce to certain international values and norms, while retaining the right to accede or join specific treaties in other cases.