<i>Digisprudence:</i> the design of legitimate code

This article introduces digisprudence, a theory about the legitimacy of software that both conceptualises regulative code’s potential illegitimacies and suggests concrete ways to ameliorate them. First, it develops notion computational legalism – ruleishness, opacity, immediacy, immutability, pervasiveness, private production before sketching how is code regulates, according design philosophy technology. These ideas are synthesised into framework digisprudential affordances, which translations requirements derived from legal conceptual language design. The ex ante focus on pivotal, in turn suggesting guiding ‘constitutional’ role for processes. includes case study blockchain applications concludes by setting out some avenues future work.