Roberta Karmel, 1st female SEC member, 86
Roberta Karmel, the first female member of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose belief that the agency stymied legitimate business activities inspired philosophical combat with her colleagues, died March 23 at her home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. She was 86.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, her son Solomon said.
Ms. Karmel’s tenure on the SEC, from September 1977 to February 1980, came at a hinge point in thinking about the role of government in regulating the economy.
On one hand, Stanley Sporkin was the SEC’s crusading chief enforcement officer, exposing corporate corruption that caused scandals as far away as Honduras, Japan, and Italy.
Yet, at the same time, President Carter, who appointed Ms. Karmel, had been elected the year before on a platform of making government leaner. His policy programs included deregulating the airline industry, measures that presaged a tilt toward laissez-faire economics in the 1980s.
Ms. Karmel seemed to be in the middle. She had worked as a lawyer at the SEC early in her career, but she had also gone into the private sector representing firms such as Merrill Lynch, often opposing in litigation the agency she had once worked for.
Within about a year of becoming an SEC commissioner, she was the subject of two profiles on the cover of The New York Times business section, cited as “the most conservative” person on the five member panel.
She could be seen at the Greenbrier resort in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., giving a speech to investment bankers about how the SEC should not only be diligent in prosecuting business people running afoul of the law but be “equally effective as a promoter” of economic activity.
When the Times asked her if her appointment indicated a “revolving door” between regulators and the industries they regulate, Ms. Karmel replied with “controlled rage,” the Times wrote. “As a citizen,” she said, “I do not want to live in a country totally run by government bureaucrats.”
Some SEC staff members accused her of pro-industry bias and legal nit-picking. Commission meetings were reported to have turned hostile.
Mark Green, a future New York City public advocate, who was then director of Congress Watch, a lobbying group associated with Ralph Nader, told the Times that Ms. Karmel was “President Carter’s worst regulatory appointment” because she had shown “disdain for the mission and legacy of the SEC.”
Ms. Karmel answered her critics in her 1982 “dissenter’s book,” as she called it, “Regulation by Prosecution: The Securities & Exchange Commission Versus Corporate America,” published by Simon & Schuster. It traced her development, as she wrote, from “an unquestioning liberal to a skeptical regulator.”
She accused SEC officials of unfairly seeing business people as “too powerful to be vigilantly protected by the Bill of Rights”; of arrogantly pursuing novel legal cases for the sake of career advancement over the responsible enforcement of precedent; and of insularly regarding junior staff as their constituency and deferring to them rather than rigorously pursuing the public interest.
She attributed her differences with her colleagues partly to Watergate. Some Americans came to see “defiant civil servants” as “heroes” for going on “puritanical witch hunts,” she wrote. She took away a different lesson: that officials should be wary of the temptation to abuse their power.
Roberta Sarah Segal was born May 4, 1937, in Chicago, where she grew up. Her parents, Jacob and Eva (Elin) Segal, were first-generation American Jews who supported President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s liberal New Deal policies. Her mother managed the home, and her father got a law degree at night school. He financed Roberta’s college education, at Radcliffe, through his stock market investments.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in history and literature in 1959 and graduated from New York University Law School in 1962. In between, she worked at a small Boston brokerage firm as an assistant to a securities analyst.
Months before she became an SEC commissioner, she was the first woman to be appointed to the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York. After her government work, she became a professor at Brooklyn Law School.
Her marriage to Paul Karmel in 1957 ended with his death in 1994. Her marriage to David Harrison in 1995 ended with his death in 2021.
In addition to Solomon, she leaves two other sons from her first marriage, Philip and Jonathan; a daughter from that marriage, Miriam Emery; two stepchildren, Andy and Rachel Harrison; a sister, Phyllis Kaplan; nine grandchildren; and one step-granddaughter.
Ms. Karmel rejected the suggestion by some that her status as the only woman on the SEC explained her contentious relationship with colleagues. Instead, she said, her sense of her gender made her grateful for her career.
“Perhaps only the women who read this book, particularly those of my generation and older, will understand the sense of identity and fulfillment I found in the law because I did not have to be ashamed of being smart,” she wrote in “Regulation by Prosecution.” “It was a joy to learn that some people, called clients, would pay me for knowing more than they did.”