Annotation

The urgency of digitalizing law in the Russian Federation is driven by the rapid advancement of technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and big data, which challenge traditional legal frameworks and necessitate adaptation of the regulatory system. The article examines the transformation of law’s classical functions—regulatory, protective, and evaluative—in a digital environment where long-standing assumptions about stable legal subjects and clearly defined objects of regulation no longer hold. The author demonstrates how digitalization creates novel challenges—from legal vacuums surrounding AI liability to the ambiguous legal status of Big Data—and argues that addressing these issues requires not merely expanding existing legal functions but fundamentally rethinking their nature. In response to legislative inertia, the state has introduced experimental legal regimes and is developing new, hybrid functions: informational-enabling and algorithmic-supervisory. The paper concludes by emphasizing the need for a unified Digital Code as a methodological core capable of ensuring coherence, consistency, and systemic integrity in legal regulation for the digital age.