Although she comes down on the right side of the question, she too manages to muddy the core academic freedom issue–you can't punish faculty for the offensiveness of their published research, full stop.  But I'm sympathetic with some of her frustration at the responses by other legal philosophers.  I don't think she or anyone needs to engage "respectfully" with Finnis's writings on homosexuality or most other matters:  he is a Catholic philosopher, the dogma determines the answers, and the arguments are awful or absurd unless you start with the dogmatic premises he accepts.  Ignoring that work is the best policy unless one is working within the Catholic tradition.  (Academic freedom also protects the rights of Catholic philosophers!)  Is Finnis a "legal giant"?  His corpus testifies to the bankruptcy of his version of natural law theory, his main arguments having been demolished so many times as to make the exercise tedious.  (If natural law theory has any hope qua theory of law it will be in Mark Murphy's work, which clearly recognizes the faults in Finnis's arguments.)  Finnis is a giant of Catholic philosophy, an excellent expositor of the natural law tradition and of Aquinas in particular, and he was the first such philosopher to meaningfully engage the post-Hartian tradition in legal philosophy:  kudos to him for all of that.  (I teach Chapter 1 of Natural Law and Natural Rights all the time, but like everyone else, I explain why that argument fails to challenge the positivist approach to jurisprudence–indeed, I often have students read Murphy's concise explanation of this point!)

Professor Smith writes, "Academic freedom is a principle worth defending, but it is foolish to ignore its costs, and who (disproportionately, quietly) bears them."  But there are no costs to the principle in this case, unless one thinks that knowing that Oxford employs an emeritus professor with reactionary Catholic views to do some teaching is harming someone.  But how could one seriously think that?  To quote another Oxford professor of jurisprudence, John Gardner:  "That something offends you, or more generally makes you feel bad, does not show that it does you any harm. We all feel bad about something most days and come out of it unscathed, just as we come out of most physical pain unscathed. Of course there may be harms that are consequences of offence and pain. Torture harms people by the use of pain. Upset may turn to depression and may then be disabling."   Knowing that an emeritus professor holds loathsome views is precisely the kind of "harm" Millian liberals did not want to countenance.  So the talk of "costs" (like Professor Smith's talk of "hate speech"–there is no statutory prohibition on hate speech I am aware of that would encompass Finnis's writings) is just a distraction from the core, and simple, academic freedom issue:   a university that respects academic freedom does not remove someone from the classroom because their research expresses offensive views (that is true whether they are a "giant" or "midget").  The only folks trying to present the issue as "complicated," I fear, are those who don't really care that much about academic freedom.