M5 Legitimacy Conservation Across Domains

This paper establishes a conservation principle for legitimacy across domains under admissibility and standing conservation. It shows that legitimacy cannot be created, accumulated, transferred, amplified, or repaired across domain boundaries; it can only be preserved within a domain or destroyed by violation. The result is derived by exhaustion: all proposed mechanisms for cross-domain legitimacy transfer—analogy, inheritance, aggregation, or post-hoc validation—are shown to rely on illicit scope transport and to fail closed. The treatment is declarative and non-procedural, placing on record a strict conservation law suitable for audit without introducing coordination schemes, enforcement mechanisms, or operational rules.