Washington ? Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan, as a Clinton White House counsel, drafted legal language designed to narrow a proposed ban on a procedure that critics call “partial-birth” abortion.

In a 1996 memo, Kagan argued it would be unconstitutional to prohibit the procedure outright — without an exception for cases where it was needed to avert “serious adverse health consequences” for the mother — and she recommended wording for such an exemption.

Kagan wrote that one of the virtues of her proposal was that “it will not make the groups” — presumably abortion-rights groups — “go crazy … because it fully protects the right of the woman to any medically necessary procedures.”

The memo is part of a roughly 40,000-page trove of documents released by the William J. Clinton Presidential Library on Friday that shed more light on what kind of justice Kagan might be.

The documents offer glimpses of Kagan’s positions on controversial issues, such as her reservations about a federal law banning assisted suicide, and instances where she took a broad view of religious freedom. And they reveal her involvement in defending Clinton from scandals that dogged his presidency and the sexual harassment lawsuit that helped lead to his impeachment.

Most of them date from her stint as an associate White House counsel for Clinton from 1995 to 1996.