When Song Min Li was sworn in as the new judge of Macau's Court of Final Appeal this week - after tragedy struck her predecessor last year - she became the first female judge in the top court of the Macau Special Administrative Region.
In November, Justice Chu Kin died, aged 42, in a Guangzhou hospital, after he sustained brain injuries in an August traffic accident in Guangdong. Chu was on holiday with his family in Taishan when the accident happened. He had been in hospital in a vegetative state and his compulsory retirement was announced before his death.
His forced retirement and subsequent death sparked further concern as to how his loss would impact on the quality of the judiciary in the former Portuguese enclave.
Chu was the first Chinese person to be appointed a judge by Macau's Portuguese government in the 1990s, and he joined the Court of Final Appeal in December 1999 when Macau was handed over to China.
Before the handover, Macau had the dubious honour of having one of the world's youngest and least experienced teams of judges. Many of the 24 judges appointed by then chief executive-designate Edmund Ho Hau-wah were only in their early 30s. Most of them joined the bench just a few years before the handover.
After Chu's forced retirement, Macau legislator Au Kam-san, of the pro-democracy group the New Macau Association, expressed fears that the quality of the judiciary would be adversely affected by this turn of events.