Supreme Court Throws Out $1.25 Million Roundup Verdict, Says Federal Law Blocks Cancer-Warning Suits

The Supreme Court on Thursday threw out a $1.25 million verdict against Monsanto and ruled that federal law bars a large class of lawsuits that blame the company's Roundup weedkiller for causing cancer.

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By a vote of 7 to 2 in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, the justices held that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, known as FIFRA, preempts state failure-to-warn claims when winning those claims would force a company to put a cancer warning on a label that the Environmental Protection Agency has not required. The decision reversed a ruling by the Missouri Court of Appeals and sent the case back down.

What the Court decided

Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority opinion. FIFRA "expressly preempts" Durnell's claim, he wrote, because winning it would require Monsanto "to add a cancer warning to Roundup's label" that is not part of the label the EPA approved. The statute carries a uniformity requirement that bars states from imposing labeling rules "in addition to or different from" the federal ones.

Kavanaugh also leaned on the agency's record. The EPA "has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer," he wrote, so "as a matter of federal law, Monsanto legally must use a label without a cancer warning unless and until EPA approves or requires a change." Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion.

The case

John Durnell, a Missouri resident, sued Monsanto after he developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a blood cancer he attributed to long-term use of Roundup. He argued the company should have warned users about a link between glyphosate, the active ingredient, and cancer. After a nine-day trial, a jury agreed and awarded him $1.25 million in compensatory damages. The Missouri Court of Appeals upheld the award. That is the judgment the Supreme Court reversed.

At argument in April, Monsanto's lawyer, former Solicitor General Paul Clement, told the justices the EPA, not individual juries, sets the standard for pesticide labels. "You shouldn't let a single Missouri jury second-guess that judgment," he said. The Trump administration's solicitor general, John Sauer, sided with Monsanto. Durnell's lawyer, Ashley Keller, argued that until Congress acts, state juries can still weigh whether a company failed to warn.

An unusual lineup

The split did not track the Court's usual ideological lines. Kavanaugh's majority included Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Amy Coney Barrett. The two dissenters were Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Justice Neil Gorsuch, pairing one of the Court's liberals with one of its conservatives.

In her dissent, Jackson wrote that the majority rested on "a labeling requirement that does not exist" and called the result "both remarkable and regrettable." The ruling "misunderstands FIFRA's requirements, misinterprets the scope of FIFRA's preemption, and ultimately leaves Durnell without a remedy for the significant harms he has suffered," she wrote. FIFRA lets the EPA review labels, she argued, but does not give the agency the last word on cancer warnings.

What it means for the other suits

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Monsanto told the Court that thousands of Roundup label suits remain pending. Legal experts said before the decision that a ruling for the company could sharply narrow its exposure in those cases. The opinion does exactly that by cutting off failure-to-warn claims that rest on the missing cancer warning, the theory behind much of the litigation.

The company, now owned by the German firm Bayer, has paid billions of dollars in settlements and verdicts over Roundup since 2015, the year a working group at the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans." The EPA, which first registered glyphosate products in 1974, has reached the opposite conclusion and continues to find the chemical does not require a cancer warning.

The dispute runs beyond the courts. Keller noted that Congress has weighed a liability shield for pesticide makers as part of the farm bill. President Trump signed an executive order this year to boost domestic production of glyphosate, a move that split some supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement, which has campaigned against the chemical.

The majority left one limit on its own holding. The preemption turns on the current EPA label, Kavanaugh wrote, and applies "unless and until" the agency changes what that label must say.