Supreme Court Rejects Lawsuit Against Bayer Alleging Roundup Weedkiller Caused Cancer

The Supreme Court on Thursday sided with the manufacturer of the weedkiller Roundup, overturning a jury award for a Missouri man who claimed the widely used herbicide caused cancer in a decision that could have sweeping impacts on thousands of other Americans who similarly claim the product sickened them.In the 7-to-2 decision, written by Justice Brett M.Kavanaugh, the majority found that a federal law that regulates pesticides barred the Missouri man’s lawsuit.Justice Kavanaugh wrote that the Missouri case would “require a cancer warning on Roundup’s label,” which would directly conflict with the label required by the federal Environmental Protection Agency.

Because of this conflict, he wrote, federal law “expressly pre-empts” the Missouri man’s claim.The dispute focused on a single case, a $1.25 million award for John Durnell, a gardener in St.Louis who had used Roundup for decades and claimed that years of exposure to the product led him to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a blood cancer.

Mr.Durnell claimed that the company had failed to warn consumers of the dangers of the product.The ramifications of the decision could be enormous, potentially jeopardizing thousands of lawsuits pending in state and federal courts against Bayer, the German company that acquired Roundup’s original maker, Monsanto, in 2018.The legal question before the justices focused on a narrow slice of the broader litigation: whether Bayer can be sued in state-level courts given that a federal agency decided not to issue a warning label for the weedkiller.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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