US Supreme Court reverses Roundup cancer lawsuits in company’s victory | Court Affairs

The United States Supreme Court has sided with the makers of Roundup weedkiller in a ruling that is expected to stop thousands of lawsuits alleging they failed to warn people that the chemical can cause cancer.

Thursday’s ruling was linked to the case itself came to the jury later a large wave of cases which included others multi-billion dollar judgments against global agrochemical producer Bayer, the German company that acquired Roundup when it bought its first producer Monsanto in 2018.

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The decision is a victory for the administration of US President Donald Trump, but one that could be a political blunder by finding allies in “Make America Healthy Again” group wants to ban the use of pesticides.

The Supreme Court, in a 7-2 decision, found that the company could not face failure-to-warn charges in state courts because state law found the cancer link dubious and did not require a warning label.

The jury overturned a Missouri jury’s decision to award $1.25m to a man named John Durnell who said he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after years of exposure to glyphosate in Roundup. The Supreme Court agreed with Bayer that the US law governing pesticides prevents failure to warn cases imposed by state law from going to court.

Bayer shares jumped nearly 18 percent following the decision.

The Trump administration supported Bayer in the lawsuit.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote the ruling, said the US Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, has determined that glyphosate does not cause cancer and did not require a cancer warning on Roundup.

The order opposes what Durnell said because “it would have required Monsanto to add a cancer warning to the Roundup label even though federal law requires Monsanto to use an EPA-approved label without a cancer warning”, Kavanaugh wrote.

Liberal judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting from Justice Neil Gorsuch, said that Durnell’s proposal would establish Monsanto’s registration requirements that federal law requires and should not be ignored.

Jackson called the decision “shocking and unfortunate, because it unfairly closes the doors of the court to claimants like Durnell”.

Bayer acquired Roundup as part of the $63bn purchase of the agrochemical company Monsanto in 2018. More than 100,000 plaintiffs filed lawsuits in US state and federal courts regarding the link to cancer, and the German pharmaceutical and crop science company had said that the lawsuits could threaten its ability to supply the herbicide to farmers.

A flurry of lawsuits previously prompted Bayer to remove glyphosate from the consumer brand of Roundup. Bayer said before the Supreme Court ruled that a favorable ruling could end the Roundup case.

“The decision of the US Supreme Court is good for science, farmers, and industries that depend on the clarity of the management of new products. It should help a lot to have Roundup cases after almost ten years of legal cases. The decision should lead to the removal of the current warnings and prevent the failure to warn in the future,” said Bayer spokesman Tino Andresen in a statement.

The company emphasized in both cases that the EPA had repeatedly found that glyphosate does not cause cancer and had approved its labeling without warning.

Faced with billions of dollars in potential debt, Bayer announced in February that it plans to restructure $7.25bn to settle tens of thousands of current and future lawsuits. The settlement will not affect claims arising from pending complaints or non-contractual claims, according to the company. This amounts to about $1bn, it said.

‘Dangerous to public health’

Environmentalists and others criticized the court’s decision on Thursday.

“Once again, the Supreme Court has sided with big business when it comes to people and the environment.” “Today’s decision is a public health disaster,” said Tarah Heinzen, director of legal affairs at the advocacy group Food and Water Watch.

“The destruction of this decision will increase our rates of cancer, infertility and chronic diseases for generations to come,” said Kelly Ryerson, executive director of the American Regeneration and Make America Healthy Again advocacy group that writes on social media under the moniker “Glyphosate Girl”.

The growing conflict stems from the US law called the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA, which regulates the sale and labeling of pesticides and bars so that they do not provide different or other requirements.

The measure bans “off-label” pesticides with labels that do not have adequate warnings to protect health and the environment.

Bayer has argued that Durnell’s claims are invalid under the statute. The EPA has repeatedly approved labels without such cancer warnings, indicating that the products were not mislabeled, the company said, adding that labels cannot be changed significantly without the agency’s approval.

Durnell’s attorneys argued that even if the EPA had registered Roundup, the label could be challenged as mislabeled. He argued that Durnell’s claim was not tried because Missouri’s state law requiring products to provide adequate warning of hazards meets FIFRA’s anti-tampering requirements.

‘A new era’

Union Investment fund manager Markus Manns called Thursday’s decision a milestone for Bayer, adding that ten years after the Monsanto acquisition, the company is “entering a new era”.

“Even if future lawsuits are not on the table, they will be very difficult. The final victory will come if the decision is accepted by the plaintiffs and accepted by the competent court in July. This will bring the subject of the glyphosate lawsuits of Bayer to a definitive end, allowing the directors to look more deeply at the work issues and methods,” said Manns.

Durnell sued Monsanto in Missouri state court in 2019, claiming it failed to warn users of the dangers associated with Roundup and glyphosate.

He was diagnosed with a rare and often aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a cancer that starts in the white blood cells, and said that the disease was related to Roundup since 1996. For almost 20 years, he was a “sprayer” for a neighborhood group in St. Louis, killing weeds in local parks without safety papers, according to court documents.

A jury agreed with Durnell in 2023, and in 2025, a state appeals court upheld the decision.