Benjamin Cunningham

Benjamin B. Cunningham (April 1, 1874 – January 2, 1946), was a long-serving New York state court judge who "in a 47-year public career initiated, fought for or passed upon legal questions of lasting importance to official Rochester". Shortly after he assumed office on the court on January 1, 1920, he fell ill, and was deemed unlikely to survive, but he spent four months in a homeopathic hospital, and then went resort in the South to recover, and was well enough to return to work in the fall of that year. He stood as a Republican candidate for the State Court of Appeals in 1940, a failing enterprise due to the continued popularity of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democratic Party in that year. He functioned as a trial judge for seventeen years before being appointed to the Appellate Division for the Fourth Department in 1937. He was elevated to Presiding Justice in 1944, a post he held for the entirety of that year.

He acted as an Official Referee from his retirement to his death on January 2, 1946. Cunningham died at his home in Rochester following a lengthy illness and decline, at the age of 71. He was interred at Holy Sepulcher Cemetery.