Should we view moments of democratic failure—when both law and the people fail to assure justice—as revealing the failure of democracy, or as revealing a contested, contingent failing that could have been otherwise? This is the question that Lida Maxwell examines in Public Trials via exploration of three writers’ diagnoses of, and responses to, democratic failure in three sets of trial writings: Edmund Burke’s writings on the Warren Hastings impeachment in late eighteenth-century Britain, Emile Zola’s writings on the Dreyfus Affair in late nineteenth-century France, and Hannah Arendt’s writings on the Eichmann trial in 1960s Israel. Maxwell argues that the stakes of how we understand democratic failure are large. Viewing moments of democratic failure as indicative of the failure of democracy—as, she argues, Plato, Rousseau, and many contemporary democratic theorists do—leads to a politics of democratic deference to authority and rules that unintentionally encourages complicity in elite and legal failures to assure justice. In contrast, what Maxwell calls “lost cause narratives” of democratic failure reveal the contingency of democratic failure on behalf of showing that things “could have been” otherwise—and might yet be. A politics of lost causes calls for democratic responsiveness to failure via practices of resistance, theatrical claims-making, and re-narration. Building on the politics of lost causes, Maxwell argues for pursuing a democratic approach to justice that foregrounds the import of democratic resistance to, and contestation of, injustice.