In recent weeks, the former Playboy model Karen McDougal and the adult-film actress and director Stephanie Clifford, also known as Stormy Daniels, have forged ahead unbound. Both women sold their silence concerning their sexual encounters with Donald Trump, and now both are asking a court to declare those contracts void. All the while, they’ve been giving extensive media interviews on matters ostensibly covered by the agreements—most notably Clifford, in a much-hyped “60 Minutes” interview.

A legal arrangement in which someone is paid not to talk (in Clifford’s case), or in which one sells one’s story in order to quash it (in the case of McDougal), is not unusual. (McDougal sold the rights to her story about the affair to American Media Incorporated (A.M.I.), the publisher of tabloid magazines such as the National Enquirer, in a deal known as a “catch and kill,” as Ronan Farrow reported for The New Yorker, in February. A.M.I. said it has not “paid people to kill damaging stories about President Trump.”) Nondisclosure clauses of various stripes are prevalent in employment contracts and many varieties of legal settlement agreements. Binding promises of confidentiality are routine because parties are usually motivated to settle disputes before they turn into lawsuits or go public, and many feel that nondisclosure is integral to buying peace.

But even though Clifford and McDougal are clear that their agreements addressed consensual sex with Trump, the image of a woman being silenced by a much more powerful man has inevitably connected itself in the public mind to Harvey Weinstein, who entered into multiple nondisclosure agreements with victims of his alleged sexual harassment and abuse. The notion that Weinstein could prey on new victims even as his past victims were bound to silence has fostered a general skepticism of N.D.A.s, which now perhaps carry a spectre of coercion and power imbalance no matter what they might cover.

Before #MeToo, several states, including Florida, Washington, and Louisiana, already had “sunshine in litigation” laws, which prohibit confidentiality provisions if they conceal “public hazards,” such as dangers to general health or safety. (The name is a riff on Justice Louis Brandeis’s quotation that sunlight is “the best of disinfectants.”) In recent months, after #MeToo, several states, including New York and California, have proposed new legislation prohibiting confidentiality provisions in contracts that have the purpose or effect of concealing discrimination or harassment. The tax bill that Congress passed in December even included a provision disallowing a deduction for “any settlement or payment related to sexual harassment or sexual abuse if such settlement or payment is subject to a nondisclosure agreement.” The McDougal lawsuit contends that an agreement that has the effect of coercing a person not to speak out on matters of public concern violates “foundational tenets of our system of government, including freedom of expression and conscience and freedom of the press.”

Amid these developments, it is tempting to think of the McDougal and Clifford cases as part of a building national referendum on nondisclosure agreements and their enforceability. This momentum is growing in part because of revelations, first reported in the Washington Post, that Trump’s senior White House staffers have signed confidentiality agreements, which are likely unenforceable and unconstitutional. In his long business and personal life, Trump has likely made thousands of contracts with associates, employees, sexual partners, and “Apprentice” contestants containing confidentiality provisions—if McDougal and Clifford’s deals were to slide, so could they all. A cottage industry of “Fire and Fury”-style tell-alls hangs in the balance.

The reformist impulses to disallow the enforcement of N.D.A.s are well intentioned. What complicates them is that they may also have the effect of taking away the bargaining leverage of less powerful parties in a dispute. Absent a legally enforceable promise to keep the matter wholly out of the public eye, many powerful people would prefer to take their chances at defending themselves in court or in the press. Sometimes the only bargaining chip the less powerful party has is the possibility of silence. Victims seeking redress could be left worse off.

It’s significant that McDougal and Clifford are both making very specific arguments against the validity of their contracts—arguments that don’t necessarily touch the enforceability of N.D.A.s, per se. Clifford claims the contract is void because Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen—rather than Trump himself—signed it, and because of the draconian amount that it obligates her to pay for breaching it. On “60 Minutes,” she told Anderson Cooper that she was physically threatened by an unknown Trump surrogate in 2011; what she alleges amounts to extortion, which would imply that she may not have entered freely into her 2016 contract. McDougal, for her part, claims that she signed her “catch and kill” contract with A.M.I. thinking it obligated the company to publish more than a hundred of her newspaper columns (which it did not). Importantly, both women allege that the money they received may have circumvented federal campaign-finance law, because the payments were unreported expenditures by, or contributions to, Trump’s campaign, intended to influence the election.

These claims open up the possibility that the legal system may find ways to avoid enforcing these agreements—or at least trim their excesses—without seriously undermining the broader phenomenon of buying and selling confidentiality through contract. Nondisclosure of the actions of a future President may be too much to expect, under any circumstances. But the ability to cast sunlight on our leaders, and all they have done, may prove the exception to the rule of legally binding parties to their silent bargain.