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 focuses on feminist legal theory and family law, with particular interest in LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, and property law, especially its intersections with the law of the sea.
Her doctoral dissertation, Masculinity as Property, employed interdisciplinary methods and used the legal concept of property as a heuristic tool to examine how law shapes and reflects societal understandings of masculinity. Her research has been published in leading, internationally recognized peer‑reviewed journals, including Feminist Legal Studies, Social and Legal Studies, and Men and Masculinities. Her recent 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, funded by a Fulbright grant in 2020, and has previously held visiting researcher positions at King’s College London (2022) and the University of California, Irvine (2023).
Select Recent Publications
Masculinity as Resource: Bridging Identity and Structural Gender Inequality through Property Theory, 0 Men and Masculinities [Men and Masculinities] 0 (2026, available online awaiting print).
Men in/and Law: Developing “Critical Legal Studies of Men and Masculinities”, 0 Feminist Legal Studies [Fem. Leg. Stud.] 0 (2025, available online awaiting print).
“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).