The Supreme Court mentioned Friday that it’ll determine whether or not tens of hundreds of individuals claiming the pesticide Roundup caused their cancer can have a day in courtroom, or whether or not a federal legislation that regulates pesticide labeling will successfully block their instances from transferring ahead.
The courtroom’s resolution to hear the case has vital sensible implications for agriculture – which closely depends on the product – and Americans who declare Monsanto violated varied legal guidelines by failing to warn them concerning the threat of cancer. It additionally raises an attention-grabbing political situation for the Trump administration, which is backing Monsanto despite the fact that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has lengthy criticized the product.
The courtroom will possible hear arguments within the spring.
Monsanto was bought by German-based Bayer in 2018.
The Supreme Court enchantment adopted a $1.25 million jury verdict in favor of John Durnell, who sued Monsanto in Missouri state courtroom in 2019, alleging that he developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after being uncovered to Roundup. A state appeals courtroom upheld that call.
Monsanto, which has confronted greater than 100,000 comparable claims throughout the nation, has argued {that a} federal legislation enacted within the Seventies that provides the Environmental Protection Agency energy to regulate pesticides preempts state legislation claims like Durnell’s. That argument, if embraced by the Supreme Court, would possible foreclose lots of the pending fits in opposition to the corporate.
The firm has already eliminated the lively ingredient in Roundup, glyphosate, from the patron model of its product. But glyphosate stays the central ingredient in industrial variations extensively utilized by farmers.
The EPA below each Democratic and Republican administration has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate doesn’t trigger cancer and has declined to require cancer warnings on Roundup’s labeling. But in 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer labeled glyphosate as an agent that’s “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Several juries have sided with plaintiffs who sought damages after claiming they had been recognized with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma because of their exposure to the product.
As the case was pending on the Supreme Court, a scientific journal retracted a landmark study it printed 25 years in the past concluding that glyphosate is protected. Emails uncovered as a part of different litigation in opposition to the corporate demonstrated Monsanto staff had been closely concerned in that examine, a scenario the journal said raised “serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability” of its authors.
“EPA has repeatedly determined that glyphosate, the world’s most widely used herbicide, does not cause cancer,” Monsanto’s lawyer advised the Supreme Court in an enchantment filed in April. “EPA has consistently reached that conclusion after studying the extensive body of science on glyphosate for over five decades.”
Durnell mentioned he sprayed the weedkiller in parks close to his residence for years.
“The result was a deadly and incurable form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer,” his attorneys advised the Supreme Court. “The jury found that Roundup caused that cancer and that Monsanto was liable for Durnell’s damages.”
Monsanto claims that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts state labeling necessities. But Durnell has countered that he relied on off-label commercials from the corporate, which he mentioned marketed the product as protected to spray with out using protecting gear.
The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to take up the case in December, claiming that after the EPA has registered a pesticide an organization can’t change its label with out the company’s approval. That means, the administration mentioned, that Missouri couldn’t tack further necessities onto the labeling for Roundup.
While that place is in line with the administration’s usually business-friendly method, it represents a break with the earlier place of its high well being official. Kennedy was a lead lawyer in one of many highest profile lawsuits looking for damages from Monsanto over Roundup.
That 2018 case noticed a jury order Monsanto to pay $289 million to Dewayne Johnson, a former groundskeeper terminally in poor health with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Johnson’s was the primary of hundreds of instances ultimately introduced in opposition to Monsanto over glyphosate’s well being impression.
It was a landmark win for Kennedy, who ran for president in 2024 on a pledge to ‘Make America Healthy Again’ that included a plan to ban generally used pesticides. After Kennedy grew to become well being secretary, he led a report that linked glyphosate and one other frequent pesticide, atrazine, to cancer, liver problems and reproductive well being problems.
But that MAHA report simply as shortly mentioned that “American farmers rely on these products” and the Environmental Protection Agency usually critiques their security. A later MAHA technique, launched in September 2025, mentioned EPA will work on focused pesticide use, however proposed no bans or additional regulation, angering some of the MAHA base.
At the identical time, advocates fought for Congress to strike language within the federal finances that will defend Monsanto and different chemical producers from future litigation. The provision was axed from a funding invoice this January after “immense public pressure,” Maine Rep. Chellie Pingree, who fought in opposition to the measure, mentioned in an announcement.