Ariël Decoster
Ariël Decoster
Ph.D., University of Antwerp and Ghent University (Belgium), 2025
LL.M., University of California, Los Angeles, 2020
LL.M., University of Antwerp (Belgium), 2019
B.Phil, UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles (Belgium), 2017
LL.B., UCLouvain Saint-Louis Bruxelles (Belgium), 2016
Ariël Decoster joined the Florida State University College of Law in 2025 as a Visiting Assistant Professor after earning her Ph.D. from the Universities of Antwerp and Ghent in Belgium. Her scholarship explores questions of law, identity, and equality at the intersection of feminist legal theory, family law, and property law. Her research examines how social identities, and masculinity in particular, are mobilized through law to distribute material and social advantages, while also investigating the social and political dimensions of property law.
Her work has appeared in law reviews and leading peer-reviewed journals, including SMU Law Review, Feminist Legal Studies, Social and Legal Studies, and Men and Masculinities. Her article, “Men in/and Law: Developing ‘Critical Legal Studies of Men and Masculinities,’” received the Feminist Legal Studies Best Article Award for 2025.
She holds an LL.M. from the University of California, Los Angeles, which she completed as a Fulbright grantee in 2020, and has held visiting research appointments at King’s College London (2022) and the University of California, Irvine (2023).
Select Recent Publications
Preserving Gender Norms Through Harm-Based Reasoning: The Best Interest of the Child Standard and Transgender Parents 79 SMU L. Rev. __ (forthcoming, 2026).
Masculinity as Resource: Bridging Identity and Structural Gender Inequality through Property Theory, 0 Men and Masculinities [Men and Masculinities] 0 (2026).
Men in/and Law: Developing “Critical Legal Studies of Men and Masculinities”, 0 Feminist Legal Studies [Fem. Leg. Stud.] 0 (2025).
“POSTED: No Trespassing”: On the Performativity of Property and Gender as Intertwined Social Practices of Power, 0 Social and Legal Studies [Soc. Leg. Stud.] 0 (2024, available online awaiting print).
Ariël Decoster & Pieter Cannoot, The Abolition of Sex/Gender Registration in the Age of Gender Self-Determination: an Interdisciplinary, Queer, Feminist and Human Rights Analysis, 1 International Journal of Gender, Sexuality and Law 26 (2020).