Method before power: interpretive canons should govern how law is read, not who reads it.

Constitutions usually settle who governs and leave the question of how legal texts are read to emerge from institutional practice. Computational law then arrives late, trying to formalize rules produced by an order that never stated its method of interpretation in closed, operational form. The hardest uncertainty is often not inside a substantive rule but in the legal order's method for deciding what the rule is.

The Gibsonia thought experiment reverses the sequence. Its canons open with De Modo, Non De Potestate, concerning method, not power: they govern how Gibsonian texts are read, bind whoever is empowered to read them, and are indifferent to which court, council or chamber that turns out to be. The design distinguishes a power constitution, which allocates competence, from an interpretive constitution, which specifies how exercises of competence are understood, and enacts the second first.

Three claims follow. Fixing method before power reduces the ability of later institutions to choose interpretive methods opportunistically, case by case. It converts a substantial class of theoretical disagreement, of the kind usually staged between Hart and Dworkin, into disagreement governed by enacted secondary rules, without pretending that open texture disappears. And it is computationally significant before any automation, because it supplies a finite source order, explicit priority relations, mandatory justification traces and a lawful amendment channel.

Gibsonia is a design probe, not a prediction, and method-first design is not politically neutral, since every canon encodes choices. The thesis is narrower. Computable law depends not only on formalizing substantive rules but on designing the law of interpretation itself, and that design is best stated before anyone knows who will hold the power to apply it.