Legal Narcissism: When the Interpreter Becomes the Measure of Its Own Power

This article develops the theory of Legal Narcissism as an analytical category for examining situations in which institutions entrusted with interpreting the legal limits of their own authority progressively come to participate in the definition, justification, and reproduction of those same limits. The concept does not describe psychological characteristics of judges, government officials, legislators, or other public actors. Rather, it identifies an institutional pattern of self-referential power. The study begins with the historical function of constitutionalism as a mechanism for constraining authority and examines the tension between the unavoidable necessity of legal interpretation and the risk of institutional self-authorization. From this distinction, it identifies structural elements through which the phenomenon may be recognized and analyzes the cycle by which interpretations, precedents, and institutional practices may progressively become grounds for further expansions of the interpreting authority's own power. The article also defines what does not constitute Legal Narcissism, distinguishing the theory from phenomena such as judicial activism, judicial supremacy, juristocracy, legal error, arbitrariness, and the mere expansion of institutional competence. It further proposes criteria for application and non-application, conditions of falsifiability, and constitutional and institutional safeguards designed to preserve law's capacity to effectively constrain the exercise of power. The central thesis is that the constitutional state presupposes a minimum asymmetry between an authority and the legal sources from which its powers derive: authority receives its powers from the legal order, but the determination of the limits of those powers cannot depend entirely on the very authority that is required to observe them. The article therefore proposes a theoretical framework capable of being applied to the study of different constitutional systems and opens a broader research agenda concerning processes of self-reference, self-justification, and the institutional expansion of power.