ActionScript 3.0 :: Make Pop-up Menu Appear In Front Of Everything Else On Stage?

I'm creating a pop-up menu for a game and I've run into some difficulty manipulating its layer 'depth' relative to the other graphics on the stage. I understand how to manipulate layers etc. when coding on the timeline, but I am making this game entirely class-based; how do you manipulate graphic 'depth' dynamically in pure AS3 code? How does the flash player assign 'depth' to symbols which are created from code in the first place? (the problem I'm having is that some graphics I add dynamically at runtime always appear above the menu, despite the fact that the menu isn't created until later, when the user presses a menu button)