Intelligibility or Incommensurability?

Abstract

In this concluding perspectives essay, Richter contends that Natives and Europeans could make each other’s legal practices intelligible when it was in their mutual interests to do so. Problems arose when interests were not shared. This was quite common on account of the starkly different aims that indigenous peoples and Europeans pursued through law and of their different understandings of “justice” and “rights.” This “incommensurability” was, in Richter’s reading, more significant than the challenge of intelligibility. Richter pursues this theme by a reading of Herzog’s, Pulsipher’s, and Dixon’s chapters in this volume and by recounting mid-seventeenth-century negotiations between the Virginia House of Burgesses and Cockacoeske (the queen of Pamunkey).