Existing minimum-symbol-error-rate equalizers were derived based on the symbol-error-rate objective function. Due to the complexity of the objective function the derivation is not straightforward. In this paper we present a new approach to derive the minimum-symbol-error-rate adaptive equalizers. The problem is formulated as minimizing the norm between two subsequent parameter vectors under the constraint of symbol-error-rate minimization. The constrained optimization problem then is solved with the Lagrange multiplier method, which results in an adaptive algorithm with normalization. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the existing adaptive minimum-symbol-error-rate equalizer in convergence speed and steady-state performance.