About PJ Mode

PJ Mode grew up in Indiana and graduated from Cornell University with a concentration in what would today be called computer science. He served for three years as a naval officer and then attended the Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review.

PJ Mode
Photo by Elaine Mode

PJ spent the next 35 years at the Washington law firm of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now Wilmer Hale), apart from periods serving on the issues staff of Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and later as Chief Counsel of the Senate Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments and Chief Legislative Assistant to Senator Birch Bayh. He was the Chairman of Wilmer from 1987 to 1995. In 2003, PJ retired from Wilmer and became Special Counsel to Citigroup. He and his wife Elaine, a photographer, moved to New York near their children and (now four) grandchildren in Brooklyn.

In July 2013, PJ retired once more. A student and collector of old maps since 1980, he now focuses on researching and collecting “persuasive cartography,” maps whose primary intent or effect is to send a message rather than to communicate geographic information. His collection now includes more than 1200 maps, in some 27 languages, dating from 1491 to the present.