With all due respect, I find it difficult to reconcile Ms. Kennedys assertion that "the people" refers collectively to state organized militia in the second amendment, without carrying this inference elsewhere.
I re-read the chapter on the 2nd amendment. I can't find *anything* that qualifies as a statement of personal opinion. The closest is a statement that "...the courts have not supported this interpretation", referring to the claim by "the gun lobby and certain scholars" that "citizens have a constitutional right to pack a gun". This is a statement of fact about what the courts have said, not a statement of the authors' personal opinions. The discussion of the Morton Grove case that they chose to illustrate the issue contains many quotes from both sides, including the gas station owner who was robbed because he had stopped wearing a gun to appear to be in compliance with the law.
Her book is extremely fast reading, and well, light.
Sorry you didn't like it. I stand behind my recommendation; I think it's an excellent collection of essays for the layman. Each essay picks a clause of the Bill of Rights and shows how it was interpreted by the courts in a real case. Included (and far more relevant to the right to develop and use cryptography than the 2nd amendment) is "US. vs The Progressive". In this 1979 case in Wisconsin, the government obtained, for the first time ever, prior restraint against the publication of privately generated and assembled information that the government considered "sensitive" - in this case, a layman's educated guess, working from open sources and his own understanding of physics, as to how thermonuclear weapons work. The case was eventually dropped, however, when another "nuclear hobbyist" published his own work. Since there has been at least one call to regulate cryptography under the same "born classified" terms as nuclear weapons (by Adm. Inman in the early 1980s), there are a lot of useful insights in this case. The section on the 4th amendment is also highly relevant (see the subject line here). The authors chose "McSurely vs McClellan", a case that I had never heard of. It showed just how egregious the police can be in abusing their authority when they are politically motivated. Although cryptography was not at issue here, it shouldn't be hard to use this case as an example of its potential importance in defending against unreasonable searches and seizures. Phil