Age is the only factor used to demarcate the boundary between juvenile and adult justice. However, little research has examined how age guides the juvenile court in determining which youth within the juvenile justice system merit particular dispositions, especially those that reflect the court's emphasis on rehabilitation. Drawing on scholarship on the court's origins, attribution theory, and cognitive heuristics, we hypothesize that the court focuses on youth in the middle of the range of the court's age of jurisdiction-characterized in this article as "true" juveniles-who may be viewed as meriting more specialized intervention. We use data from Florida for court referrals in 2008 (N = 71,388) to examine the decision to proceed formally or informally and, in turn, to examine formally processed youth dispositions (dismissal, diversion, probation, commitment, and transfer) and informally processed youth dispositions (dismissal, diversion, and probation). The analyses provide partial support for the hypothesis. The very young were more likely to be informally processed; however, among the informally processed youth, the youngest, not "true" juveniles, were most likely to be diverted or placed on probation. By contrast, among formally processed youth, "true" juveniles were most likely to receive traditional juvenile court responses, such as diversion or probation.The origins of the juvenile court derive from a conceptualization of juveniles as different than adults. To the court founders, for example, youth were viewed as less culpable than adults and more responsive to rehabilitation (Bernard and Kurlychek, 2010;Feld, 1999). They were considered to be more deserving of society's benign intervention. The guiding philosophy of the juvenile court, captured in the philosophy of parens patriae, emphasized the notion that the juvenile court should act much as a caring parent would, intervening where appropriate with a firm hand (Mears, 2012). Punishment featured prominently in this vision, but accountability and rehabilitation were, if anything, more central (