The Law that Never Was
1985 book by William J. Benson and Martin J. "Red" Beckman
The Law That Never Was: The Fraud of the 16th Amendment and Personal Income Tax is a 1985 book by William J. Benson and Martin J. "Red" Beckman which claims that the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, commonly known as the income tax amendment, was never properly ratified. In 2007, and again in 2009, Benson's contentions were ruled to be fraudulent.
Background
Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, an amendment proposed by Congress must be ratified by three-fourths of the states to become part of the Constitution. The Article permits Congress to specify, for each amendment, whether the ratification must be by each state's legislature or by a constitutional convention in each state; for the Sixteenth Amendment, Congress specified ratification by the legislatures. There were 48 states in the Union in 1913 – the year when the Sixteenth Amendment was finally ratified – which meant that the Amendment required ratification by the legislatures of 36 states to become effective. In February 1913, Secretary of State Philander C. Knox issued a proclamation that 38 states had ratified the amendment. According to Congressional analysis, a total of 42 states had ratified the amendment as of 1992.
Contentions
Prior to Benson, the "non-ratification" argument was presented by James Walter Scott in the 1975 case of United States v. Scott, some sixty-two years after the ratification. Scott's argument was to no avail; he was convicted of willful failure to file federal income tax returns for the years 1969 through 1972, and the conviction was upheld by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
The public source identifies “The Law that Never Was” as 1985 book by William J. Benson and Martin J. "Red" Beckman. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Never, book and William.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7746423. The first chronological checks are 1985, 2007, 2009 and 1913.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Law that Never Was” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.