 The case boiled down to one fundamental legal issue, had the Volksraad enacted the relevant legislation in accordance with the Constitution?In January 1897 the High Court held that it had not, granted Brown's claim, and claimed the right to examine all legislation in order to ascertain its constitutional validity, the so-called ‘testing right’..The root of the problem was the slipshod nature of the Constitution, a document born of political compromise between warring factions rather than any kind of coherent legal document.