President George W. Bush yesterday nominated a skeptic of hedge fund regulation to the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Troy Paredes, a law professor at Washington University in St. Loouis, was nominated to fill the seat of Paul Atkins, a Republican, who was among the most outspoken opponents of the hedge fund registration rule, which passed in 2004. He and fellow Republican Commissioner Cynthia Glassman, who left the SEC two years ago, were the two Commission votes against the rule. He announced his plans to step down after six years on the SEC.

The Commission’s two Democrats, Roel Campos and Annette Nazareth, both supporters of the rule, also recently left the SEC. The Senate has not acted on Bush’s nominees to replace them; it is expected to act on all three nominees simultaneously.

Parades demonstrated some skepticism of the SEC’s registration rule—junked by a federal court in 2006—in several academic papers, suggesting it was politically motivated. He has also written favorably about a voluntary “best practices” approach to regulating the hedge fund industry.