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. In a 1977 case involving a tax protester named Bob Tammen, a U.S. District Court noted that Tammen was involved with a group called "United Tax Action Patriots," which took the position "that the Sixteenth Amendment was improperly passed and therefore invalid...." However, the specific issue of the validity of the ratification was neither presented to nor decided by the court. William Benson's book relates how, in 1984, nine years after the Scott case and seventy-one years after the ratification was proclaimed, Benson began a research project to investigate the ratification process by traveling to the National Archives and the capitols of various New England states to review documents relating to the ratification of the Amendment. Benson found variations in wording, punctuation, capitalization, and pluralization in the language of the Amendment as ratified by many