Abstract
Background: This article examines the role of the Supreme Court of the Republic of Kazakhstan's legal positions in ensuring consistency in judicial practice in cases involving the application of competition (antimonopoly) law. It focuses on the judiciary's evolving role in the context of the establishment of administrative justice and the increasing complexity of state market regulation. It argues that decisions of the highest judicial authority increasingly go beyond resolving individual disputes and acquire systemic significance for legal interpretation and enforcement. Method: The study employs formal legal, systemic-structural, and comparative legal methods. The empirical basis includes administrative court decisions and the Supreme Court of the Republic of Kazakhstan rulings in antimonopoly cases. These methods allow identification of stable patterns of judicial interpretation and assessment of their impact on the development of competition law regulation. Results and Conclusions: The analysis shows that the Supreme Court's legal positions serve a coordinating function, ensuring coherence in judicial practice in the absence of a formally established doctrine of precedent. The study identifies a gradual shift from a formalistic to a functional approach in assessing administrative acts issued by competition authorities, where emphasis is placed not on the form of the act but on its legal effects. It also shows that Supreme Court jurisprudence helps fill legislative gaps and resolve normative uncertainties, thereby shaping more predictable standards of legal application. The study shows that in Kazakhstan a model of de facto precedential influence is gradually taking shape, where the Supreme Court's legal positions begin to play a guiding role for lower courts. This contributes to greater consistency in judicial practice and improves legal certainty in antimonopoly regulation. At the same time, this development inevitably raises broader questions about how far courts should go in shaping the content of law and where the boundary lies between interpretation and law-making.