Roberta Karmel, first woman named to the SEC, dies at 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- onHudson, N. Y. She was 86.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, her son Solomon said.
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.
At the same time, President Jimmy Carter, who appointed 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.
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, 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 proindustry bias and legal nitpicking. 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 Karmel was “President Carter’s worst regulatory appointment” because she had shown “disdain for the mission and legacy of the SEC.”
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.
Roberta Sarah Segal was born May 4, 1937, in Chicago, where she grew up. Her parents, Jacob and Eva ( Elin) Segal, were firstgeneration 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.