This casebook focuses on three themes: legal, administrative, and policy issues associated with regulating children rather than adults; procedural and substantive implications of a justice system that emphasizes treatment rather than punishment; and tensions between discretion and rules that occur when states treat children rather than punish adults. It examines adolescents' competence to exercise procedural rights and changing conceptions of their culpability which affect their dispositions in juvenile courts and sentences as adults in criminal courts. It incorporates empirical evaluations, developmental psychological and neuroscience research on adolescent competence, and presents criminological studies of controversial issues such as gender and racial disparities in juvenile justice administration. It examines pretrial detention and alternative sentencing options available to juvenile courts and discusses how and when states try youths in criminal court. This edition includes the Supreme Court's recent Eighth Amendment decisions that recognized that children are different and limit judges' sentencing authority; Fifth Amendment decisions that reappraise the impact of youthfulness during interrogation; and Fourth Amendment decisions affecting school officials' authority to search.