The sudden emergence of digital economy has brought challenges to the order of rule of law, which is an important support for the governance system and governance capacity, and also created a brand-new demand for the rule of law. Facing the new "governance deficit", how to provide high-quality "legal products" and build a legal order that is conducive to the development and governance of digital economy has become a top priority. However, digital economy, as a newly emerging thing, is highly dependent on scientific and technological innovation, and is in the process of continuous innovation, development and change, with typical characteristics such as being innovative, border-crossing, virtual and platform-based. The unified rule of law supply from the central level faces many practical difficulties, and it cannot effectively activate the driving force for innovation and development of local digital economy. To this end, the central government adopted the Implementation Plan of the National Digital Economy Innovation and Development Experimental Zone, selected some places to carry out pilot projects on digital economy innovation, development and governance, and encouraged the pilot zones to strengthen institutional innovation and explore local laws and regulations. Against this background, the development of the rule of law in the digital economy, in addition to the central government’s unified promotion of the supply of basic legal systems such as the Personal Information Protection Law and the Data Security Law, has become an issue that has to be paid attention to, such as how it is possible for local governments to access part of the rule of law supply in theory, whether it has a realistic foundation in practice, what challenges it faces and how to overcome them. Based on this, this paper explores the theoretical basis and practical path of the experiment of rule of law in the field of digital economy by means of logical reasoning and empirical analysis. Research finds that the experiment of rule of law at the local level in digital economy is an empirical governance method that effectively responds to the demand of rule of law in digital economy. The theoretical logic lies in taking the whole country’s rule of law as the ultimate destination, taking the exploration of local digital rule of law as the method, paying attention to local trial and error and experience accumulation, taking the organic combination of "top-down" and "bottom-up" as the path choice for the construction of digital economy rule of law, and starting from the interests represented by the central and local governments in the development and governance of digital economy and the realistic difficulties encountered, to construct the rule of law pattern meeting the governance needs with Chinese characteristics. However, the right to create local rule of law granted by the Constitution and its related laws, the authorization and encouragement of the central government to the pilots and trials in innovation-driven development of local digital economy, and the accumulation of digital rule of law development experience of the "pilot projects" in some provinces provide a realistic possibility for a wider and deeper local law-based pilot in this field. Of course, this empirical rule of law path of digital economy also faces challenges such as the expansion of local digital rule of law boundary, local data protectionism, and single local digital governance mode. It needs to be limited by the principle of national legal unity, the goal of national unified market, and the construction of pluralistic co-governance pattern, so as to overcome the disadvantages in the rule of law experiment at the local level of digital economy and give full play to its advantages.