Legal scholar Daniel Friedman, one of the central critics of the Supreme Court, criticizes the Court's performance in many areas where it does not screen out matters which are not within its jurisdiction, such as the army mobilization law. He has analyzed this in particular as follows:
"Thirty years ago, the High Court began dealing with the issue of army duty of yeshiva students and since then, it has promulgated a long string of rulings, most of them incorporating complex components. These judicial rulings, which amount to many hundreds of pages, often deal with abolishing Knesset legislation without sufficient legal basis.
"A common Court claim is that those laws violate the principle of equality before the law, but the right of equality was not included, deliberately, among those values protected by the "Basic Law: Man's Dignity and Freedom." The tactic by which they circumvent this is with the argument that the lack of equality strikes at Human Dignity. However I maintain that there is serious doubt that the non-induction of yeshiva students strikes at the human dignity of those who are inducted.
"At any rate, the whole process of induction is faulty, without any reference to chareidim, with regard to a many inequities: there is no equality between men and women, between religious women and non-religious ones, and most minority citizens are not included in army call-ups.
"Beyond this, there comes the moment when one must view the picture as a whole. What has the massive judicial input achieved in the subject? The answer is, approximately nothing. In the latest ruling on the issue, Judge Rubinstein spoke about `the futility and the absurdity' — chucha ve'itelula — created through the ping pong activities between the different government authorities. This, however, did not prevent him from further pursuing, together with the other judges of the majority, and sustaining the process of futility and absurdity.
"The time has come to liberate ourselves from square box thinking and to find a way to stop dealing with subjects where the court's contribution is nil and the damage in its dealing with them far surpasses any gain."
