WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced Friday it will hear Monsanto’s claim that it should be shielded from tens of thousands of lawsuits over its weed killer Roundup because the Environmental Protection Agency has not required a warning label that it may cause cancer.
The justices will not resolve the decades-long dispute over whether Roundup’s key ingredient, glyphosate, causes cancer.
Some studies have found it is a likely carcinogen, and others concluded it does not pose a true cancer risk for humans.
However, the court may free Monsanto and Bayer, its parent company, from legal claims from more than 100,000 plaintiffs who sued over their cancer diagnosis.
The legal dispute involves whether the federal regulatory laws shield the company from being sued under state law for failing to warn consumers.
In product liability suits, plaintiffs typically seek to hold product makers responsible for failing to warn them of a known danger.
John Durnell, a Missouri man, said he sprayed Roundup for years to control weeds without gloves or a mask, believing it was safe. He sued after he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
In 2023, a jury rejected his claim the product was defective but it ruled for him on his “strict liability failure to warn claim,” a state court concluded. He was awarded $1.25 million in damages.
Monsanto appealed, arguing this state law verdict is in conflict with federal law regulating pesticides.
“EPA has repeatedly determined that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, does not cause cancer. EPA has consistently reached that conclusion after studying the extensive body of science on glyphosate for over five decades,” the company told the court in its appeal.
They said the EPA not only refused to add a cancer warning label to products with Roundup, but said it would be “misbranded” with such a warning.
Nonetheless, the “premise of this lawsuit, and the thousands like it, is that Missouri law requires Monsanto to include the precise warning that EPA rejects,” they said.
On Friday, the court said in a brief order that it would decide “whether the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts a label-based failure-to-warn claim where EPA has not required the warning.”
The court is likely to hear arguments in the case of Monsanto vs. Durnell in April and issue a ruling by late June.
Monsanto says it has removed Roundup from its consumer products, but it is still used for farms.
Last month, Trump administration lawyers urged the court to hear the case.
They said the EPA has “has approved hundreds of labels for Roundup and other glyphosate-based products without requiring a cancer warning,” yet state courts are upholding lawsuits based on a failure to warn.
Environmentalists said the court should not step in to shield makers of dangerous products.
Lawyers for EarthJustice said the court “could let pesticide companies off the hook — even when their products make people sick.”
“When people use pesticides in their fields or on their lawns, they don’t expect to get cancer,” said Patti Goldman, a senior attorney. “Yet this happens, and when it does, state court lawsuits provide the only real path to accountability.”
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