Meet the (likely) next two SEC commissioners. Some fundsters may have met one of them before.

Lisa M. Fairfax George Washington University U.S. Law Professor

On Tuesday U.S. President Barack Obama nominated Hester Maria Peirce and Lisa M. Fairfax, Peirce to fill the Republican spot vacated on October 2 by Daniel Gallagher and Fairfax to fill the spot held by Democrat Luis Aguilar.

Both Fairfax and Peirce already sit on the SEC's investor advisory committee, and Fairfax also spent three years on the national adjudicatory council of Finra and four years on its Nasdaq market regulation committee. Yet it is Peirce that may be the most familiar to fundsters. She worked at the SEC from 2000 to 2008, the first four years as a staff attorney in the investment management division and the second four years as counsel to then-commissioner Paul Atkins.

The Associated Press, FA magazine, MarketWatch, the New York Times, Reuters, ThinkAdvisor, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post all covered the nominations.

It's been widely observed that, if Fairfax and Peirce are confirmed, the SEC will have four female commissioners and just one male commissioner. It's also worth noting that Fairfax is a candidate who was suggested by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) and other finance-unfriendly progressives. And Peirce, like Piwowar, has worked for Senator Richard Shelby (R-Alabama), the chair of the Senate Banking Committee.

Peirce has spoken out against the Dodd-Frank law, and ThinkAdvisor predicts that she will also oppose an SEC-mandated fiduciary standard for brokers. Meanwhile, the WSJ is attacking Fairfax as having "little market experience" and mentions that she wrote an article called "Easier Said Than Done: A Corporate Law Theory for Actualizing Social Responsibility Rhetoric."

Fairfax is an alumnus of Harvard, is a professor at George Washington University Law School, and co-chairs the DirectWomen Board Institute. She previously spent five years at Ropes & Gray, a law firm that should be pleasantly familiar to many fundsters. And she's also worked with Georgetown University Law Center, the University of Maryland School of Law, the American Bar Association's corporate laws committee, and the Association of American Law Schools, as well as Finra.

Peirce is an alumnus of Case Western Reserve and Yale. She is a senior research fellow at George Mason University. She spent two years at the law firm now called WilmerHale and clerked for U.S. Court of Federal Claims judge Roger Andewelt, in addition to working with the SEC and with the Senate Banking Committee. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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