Аңдатпа
Background: Freedom of entrepreneurship serves as a practical rule-of-law criterion because regulatory intervention directly affects private actors’ autonomy, property interests, and legal certainty. In Kazakhstan, this freedom is constitutionally protected, but its practical effect depends on how administrative bodies justify restrictive measures and how courts review their legality, evidentiary basis, and proportionality. The article examines the relationship between administrative reasoning, discretionary decision-making, and judicial protection in disputes affecting entrepreneurial activity. It focuses on the extent to which courts can transform formal guarantees into effective protection against unjustified restrictions. Method: The study combines limited doctrinal analysis with an illustrative examination of one published administrative ruling. The Constitution establishes the legal status of entrepreneurial freedom. At the same time, selected provisions of the Administrative Procedural and Process-Related Code and the Entrepreneurial Code provide general criteria governing discretion, proportionality, procedure, and supervision. The Energo-upravlenie LLP ruling is the only case analysed individually. The empirical component is limited to one published judicial ruling. The World Justice Project Rule of Law Index 2025 is used solely as an external institutional benchmark. The study does not use a continuous official dataset of judicial statistics or conduct longitudinal statistical analysis. The study does not claim comprehensive normative coverage, representative case-law analysis, or statistical generalisation. The study did not conduct cross-to-case or intervention-group comparisons, correlation analysis, regression modelling, sensitivity testing, double coding, or intercoder reliability assessment. A generic prospective coding protocol is provided separately in the supporting materials deposited on Zenodo. It was not mapped onto Kazakhstan’s legislation, tested against national judicial practice, or used in the empirical analysis. Results and Conclusions: The selected ruling documents a dispute concerning an unscheduled tax inspection and the judicial review of the contested administrative acts. The doctrinal analysis identifies five functional areas of regulatory discretion: initiation of intervention, evidentiary assessment, selection and intensity of the measure, procedural participation and reason-giving, and subsequent administrative or judicial correction. It permits reconstruction of the procedural path, the legal positions presented in the proceedings, and the judicial outcome recorded in the published text. The ruling does not establish that the intervention was based on vague statutory grounds, insufficient evidence, or an incomplete assessment of necessity and balancing, because the judicial act did not expressly determine these issues. Such criteria are retained only as elements of an author-developed analytical framework for future application to a broader body of judicial materials. The proposed legal measures include clearer regulatory triggers, evidentiary thresholds, structured reasoning requirements, accessible risk-assessment criteria, and institutional feedback from review outcomes. The case-specific conclusion is therefore limited to the institutional availability of judicial review in a dispute affecting entrepreneurial activity.