UCLA School of Law

This chapter uses the global portrait of juvenile justice found in the rest of this volume — that includes chapters on juvenile justice in China, Europe, India, Latin America, Muslim-majority states, Poland, Scandinavia, South Africa, and South Korea and Japan — to discuss possible explanations for the almost ubiquitous existence of separate juvenile courts around the world. After briefly analyzing the role that power, emulation, and structural factors have played in the global diffusion of the juvenile court, we discuss what theory of juvenile courts may underlie their actual practices. We argue that the main function that juvenile courts have performed has been letting juvenile offenders grow up out of crime and that such a function also provides the best justification for the continuing existence of these courts.