Well, we don’t, do we? I don’t think we can suppose that wider society has a coherent theory of legitimate choice to begin with. Appropriately, North Korea really has been allegedly kidnapping South Koreans, and insists that they have actually defected of their own free will and refuses to allow them to return to South Korea. But the conventional wisdom here seems to be to assume that the South, not the North, is correct – and to complicate this further, it is evident that despite this neither the South nor the international community would consider this a priority in DPRK relations.

States (and their electorates) are concerned about different things than the movement of a tiny minority of people, unless one of them somehow becomes the basis of a sympathetic campaign, in which case the state still concerns itself with sympathy rather than coherence. Likewise in this case of Jamie L Jones; there have undoubtedly been previous cases where some employee has been similarly prevented from going to government court, but there is controversy only now because Jones is exceptionally sympathetic.

Recall that when the economy went sour in Qatar and hundreds of Western expatriates – who had obtained work visas in Qatar with all their associated conditions – suddenly got in debt trouble, coverage didn’t go “yeah well you agreed to be subject to those laws, suck on it”. Coverage went “universal human rights, outdated medieval bankruptcy laws, etc.” We do let people tie themselves to other nations, we don’t think this implies adult choice of law. At least for some laws.

I.E. “CompuSoft uses a EULACLUB Restrictive license. Please enter your current EULACLUB membership ID to sign”

That makes a lot of sense. Companies buy rights to use the agreement, which pays for lawyers to enforce. Users only need to read a few contracts once before they can revert to a shortform.