Sixtine Van Outryve is a J.S.D. candidate at Yale Law School, where she obtained her LL.M. degree as a BAEF fellow in 2018. She is also a lecturer at Radboud Universiteit in The Netherlands, teaching political theory to master’s students. In March 2024, Sixtine defended her Ph.D. in Law at the Centre for Philosophy of Law of U.C.Louvain in Belgium, her home country. In her dissertation, she developed a normative theory of communalist direct democracy – defending that public power be exercised by the assembled people at the local level – and analyzed its practice by social movements through qualitative research methods (see a summary of her Ph.D. in English, and the full text in French). During her doctoral journey, she was a visiting researcher at the School of Social and Political Science of Edinburgh University in the United Kingdom (2021-2022) and at the CERAPS of Université de Lille in France (Spring 2023). She also holds a master’s degree in Law from K.U.Leuven in Belgium (2015), as well as a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy (2014) and in Law (2013), both from U.C.Louvain where she became a teaching assistant in Law at the beginning of her career.
In her J.S.D., she explores how unions, as collective vehicles for workers to express their voice, could be democratized to both increase their legitimacy and strengthen democratic life at large. Combining normative and empirical approaches, her project pursues three aims: first, to build a critique of “union representative democracy” by exploring how the critique of representative government can be applied to unions; second, to study the conditions for democratically constructing workers’ voice through democratic innovations relying on rank-and-file assemblies, that is, of “union assembly democracy”; third, to develop the articulation between union democracy and other democratic spheres.
Her main academic endeavor consists in exploring how ideals of direct democracy and self-government can be rethought in various spheres of life, both normatively in democratic theory and in the field by social actors. She has published several articles of democratic theory, in journals such as Constellations, the Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, Urban Studies, and Participations.
Doctoral Committee
Professors Daniel Markovits (chair), Monica Bell (reader), Amy Kapczynski (reader) and Hélène Landemore (reader).
Education
Ph.D in Law, UCLouvain, 2024
LL.M., Yale Law School, 2018
Master’s degree in Law, KULeuven, 2015
Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, UCLouvain, 2014
Bachelor’s degree in Law, UCLouvain, 2013
Contact information
sixtine.vanoutryve@yale.edu