Booleans, conditional operators and autoboxing

Why does this throw NullPointerException

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    Boolean b = true ? returnsNull() : false; // NPE on this line.
    System.out.println(b);
}

public static Boolean returnsNull() {
    return null;
}

while this doesn't

public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
    Boolean b = true ? null : false;
    System.out.println(b); // null
}

?

The solution is by the way to replace false by Boolean.FALSE to avoid null being unboxed to boolean --which isn't possible. But that isn't the question. The question is why? Are there any references in JLS which confirms this behaviour, especially of the 2nd case?