Former President Bill Clinton vividly remembers the first presentation that his young legal adviser, Elena Kagan, made in the Oval Office. Against the wishes of his economic team and top congressional Democrats, Clinton in late 1995 was considering vetoing new legislation that was framed as a way to halt frivolous lawsuits against the securities industry. At his direction, Kagan had analyzed the bill and determined that it would raise the bar so high for such suits that shareholders could be prevented from pursuing legitimate fraud claims. 'There she was, in her mid-30s starting out in her career, with the entire economic team, all of them against her position, and she knew it,' he said Friday in a phone interview, making his first extensive public comments about his onetime aide since her nomination to the Supreme Court. 'She stood there and defended her conclusion,' Clinton said. 'It was very impressive. She was composed, direct and totally unfazed that all those guys wanted a different outcome.' Clinton accepted her judgment and issued a surprise veto -- one of two occasions when he was overridden by Congress. He went on to name Kagan to a federal appeals court position, though her nomination was never acted on by the Republican-led Senate. As hearings now approach on her nomination to the Supreme Court, Clinton said he saw her as a strong choice by President Barack Obama. 'She was unfailingly meticulous in trying to determine what the law actually is and what the facts actually were,' he said. 'She never let whatever feelings she had get in the way of doing that. I think she can be fair.' The positive comments and recollections by Clinton were one of the final bits of careful choreography leading up to the confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which are scheduled to begin June 28. Kagan will no doubt face questions about her work in the Clinton White House as both an associate counsel and a domestic policy adviser. Recounting Kagan's role in politically charged issues like welfare reform and abortion, Clinton said he thought she benefited from working in the White House and seeing how federal law and policy intersected with real-world conditions. 'It exposed her to a lot of things,' he said. 'You want somebody on the court who is really smart and knows the law and understands it. But you also want somebody who cares about the impact of the decisions they make on ordinary people. Will this law change the lives of people, and if so, how?' One such instance, he said, was his decision to twice veto legislation written by Republicans to outlaw the procedure opponents call partial-birth abortion. Clinton said the fight over banning a procedure that he opposed was very intense as Republicans sought to build a case for coming elections. He said he might have been inclined to sign the measure had advisers found it to be a 'close call' on whether it was constitutional and did not require an exception for cases where the health of the mother was at risk -- a main point of contention. But he said his final view was bolstered by internal legal opinions that said the Republican measure was flawed without an exception for the health of the mother. His decision to veto the measure was driven home at a White House news conference, he said, when five women spoke agonizingly about undergoing the procedure because of serious risks to themselves and their fetuses. 'The truth is, for a very small percentage of women with a problem it was medically necessary,' Clinton said. 'At least that is what I thought and that is what she thought.' Kagan referred to the five women herself in a 1997 memo to Clinton that she co-wrote, saying they would fall under the health exception included in a stringent Democratic abortion proposal she recommended the president endorse in keeping with his call for a narrow exception available only when a woman 'faces real, serious adverse health consequences.' Clinton said he believed that Kagan's role as a White House representative in talks with Congress over tobacco legislation showed that she could play a strong part in shaping Supreme Court opinions. As for concerns from the left that Kagan might be too much of a centrist to provide a liberal counterweight to conservative justices, Clinton acknowledged that he did not see her as a liberal in the mold of Justices Thurgood Marshall or William J. Brennan Jr. 'I think she is really sort of a common-sense progressive,' he said. 'I think she has good liberal values, but she is also immensely practical and I think she will be fair to both parties.' 