Abstract: Chief Justice Earl Warren was a great sports fan and watched a lot of sports on TV. Perhaps for that reason he was appalled at the idea of cameras in the courtroom. Thirty years ago, he brought the Supreme Court within one vote of declaring televised criminal trials to be unconstitutional. The Hollywoodization of trials would be their undoing, he wrote, because the search for truth would be subverted into the search for ratings. He worried that trial participants would behave differently under the glare of publicity, and that those watching trials on TV would get a distorted view of the American justice system. They might even be driven to doubt it.