I thought of rewriting this since it's been removed (by Henry F.) from the thread where I posted it but I'll just add a couple things in brackets.

It's really pretty simple:
A tenured law professor having both shown required competence and kissed enough ass to achieve his status may argue that the officers of the court in Nazi Germany were right to do their jobs as they did because they were following existing law.* However, if that law professor is shown to have acted on that argument as an officer of the Nazi court, he may be put on trial or have the case examined by the bar and being found guilty in either case, even if only of ethical violations, he may be fired from his job. [Leiter replies to a similar hypothetical here] It's a bit formalistic but formalism is important: people in Cloudkookooland can say what they want, but if they come to earth and act on their beliefs they can be judged here, and then not be allowed back in.

I defend this logic, but the contempt of Leiter and others for the Hoi Polloi gets to be annoying. Academic independence serves society by allowing people to think freely even when those thoughts are little more than dreams and fantasies. Academic independence is about the right to risk sounding like an idiot. I defend that right. But when academics begin to sound like priests we have every right to tell them that a little humility is is order.
"Academic freedom predates freedom of speech"
That's a good description but a lousy defense. The fact that that was not obvious to the author, Eric Rauchway, is a problem and a big one.

The banality of self-importance. As I said in another comment on Rauchway's post, academic freedom predated free speech in the past for the same reason it’s predating free speech today in the Peoples Republic of China: it’s a both a pressure vent and a distraction, and technical advancement is important even in most authoritarian regimes. Academic free speech is an early example of the fight for broader rights. To acknowledge that the Crown saw fit to acquiesce is not a defense of the crown, nor is it a wise choice to use the crown as a defense of the prerogatives of academia. A historian shouldn't make such mistakes.

Also it's clear Henry Farrell understand's neither academic freedom nor tenure: "...an institution whose general merits I am somewhat ambiguous about ..."

I’ve suggested that academic freedom is a good thing on pragmatic grounds, but also made clear that it fundamentally depends on public willingness to delegate some degree of self-governance to the academy. If the public decides that academic freedom isn’t working out in terms of the goods it provides, then too bad for academic freedom.

If the public decides that democracy isn’t working out in terms of the goods it provides, then too bad for democracy.
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*The corollary to this is that if he'd made that argument earlier the odds are he wouldn't have gotten tenure. As Mark Graber pointed out there's a difference between legally arguable and morally correct. I'm sloppy. I was referring to the moral argument. Tenure and academic status generally are tied to both technically and socially acceptable practice.