Another piece of legal criticism is that a full-fledged law was not needed to enforce a measure that basically amounts to a new set of school regulations. Any binding document of lesser value (such as a "décret" or an "arrêté ministeriel") would have had a similar effect. Since the writing of the Napoleonic Code, a principle of French law has been that it must be, in the words of the great legislator Portalis, "general and abstract." Critics therefore argue that, by legislating on issues that could be solved with texts other than laws, the French legislature lowers the values of the law in general. Article 34 of the Constitution of France vests power in Parliament to legislate on the "fundamental principles of teaching", leaving the application of these principles to the executive branch. By legislating on such minutiae, the argument goes, Parliament may have overstepped the "domain of the law" ("domaine de la loi") that is set out by the Constitution only for the sake of pleasing the media and some interest groups.