Experimental legal regulation as a means of ensuring sustainable development

Introduction: the priorities of sustainable development of a modern state cannot be achieved without stable and high-quality legal regulation. For law-making decisions to be thought out and guaranteed to achieve their goals, various mechanisms of their approbation and improvement are used, including experimental legal regulation. Purpose: to reveal the features of the institution of experimental legal regimes in the field of digital innovations, new for Russian legislation, by comparing it with the concept of “legal experiment”. Methods: formal-legal, comparative. Results: the paper reveals two approaches in which the concept of “experimental legal regime in the field of digital innovation” is considered by researchers. In a broad sense, it is proposed to speak of it as a kind of legal experiment, in a narrow sense - as an independent legal institution that differs from the classical legal experiment in terms of purpose, content and role in the mechanism of legal education. With a broad approach, we can talk not only about formalized experiments (directly fixed as such by the normative legal acts), but also about the experiments actually conducted. In such cases, the experiments are not always carried out in compliance with the proper methodology, which requires the existence of experimental goals, criteria for their achievement, the procedure for evaluating and taking into account the results. Conclusions: the legislation on experimental legal regimes in the field of digital innovations is an attempt to systematically consolidate a unified procedure for conducting experiments in the legal regulation and evaluating their results.