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Levy Maria Jordão, First Viscount of Paiva Manso, was the eldest son of Abel Maria Jordão de Paiva Manso (the first baron of this title) and D. Catarina Angélica Dias Meneses. He married D. Maria Henriqueta de Araújo, as a result of which his title was not passed on to his descendants. He studied Law at Coimbra, and completed his doctorate in 1853, having received many prizes over the years of his university education. He became a member of the Lisbon City Council (1856–59), a member of the National Assembly, assistant auditor to the Navy Ministry (1859), a professor in the Higher School of Letters (from 1862), assistant to the Crown Attorney General (1866) and a member of His Majesty’s Privy Council.
He was in the third year of his Law degree, aged nineteen, when he published his first historical study – Ensaio sobre a História do Direito Romano [Essay on the History of Roman Law] (1850), the first volume of which would be followed by two others, published in the succeeding years. The importance given to historical aspects in the academic education of lawyers at that time was also extended to debates on doctrine and jurisprudence, while also playing an essential part in juridical exposition itself. From that time on LMJ would consolidate precisely that symbiosis between the fields of historiography and law, making use of his juridical knowledge as a method of argument, exposition and doctrine so as to extend the dimensions and complexity of his historical studies.
In the dissertation he defended at the conclusion of his doctorate he focused on the more specific problem of the Fundamento do Direito de Punir [Basis of the Right to Punish] (1853), particularly with regard to the essential questions of the legitimacy and the effectiveness of penal sanctions applied within the criminal justice system. Fully integrating himself into what was at the time a European-wide debate, LMJ adopted an optimistic view on correction in the way that he defined penal law as an instrument for the juridical, social and moral recuperation of the criminal, arguing that the right to punish was a primary right of the state, committed to maintaining social order threatened by crime and by the social disintegration that it engendered.
