Breaking: U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Case That Could Protect Pesticide Giant Bayer From Cancer Lawsuits
The U.S. Supreme Court announced late today that it will take on the issue of whether pesticide makers can be held liable for failing to warn the public that their products may cause cancer if the EPA doesn’t require a warning label on the products. After losing an appeal to the Missouri State Supreme Court, Bayer asked the Supreme Court to hear a case involving John Durnell, a St. Louis gardener who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2019, after using Roundup weedkiller for decades.
The U.S. Supreme Court today said it will hear a controversial case that could determine whether Bayer can be held liable for failing to warn people that Roundup weedkiller may cause cancer.
If the court rules in Bayer’s favor, it would be nearly impossible to sue any pesticide maker for failing to warn consumers about health risks — even if the company knows about the risk — unless the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandates a warning label on the product.
Such a ruling would reshape the national regulatory landscape and effectively limit one of the largest waves of tort litigation in American history.
“This case isn’t just about one product from one company,” said Michael Baum, an attorney who has litigated landmark cases against Monsanto. Baum secured major verdicts in favor of people who alleged Roundup caused their cancer. “A ruling for Monsanto [now Bayer] would create blanket immunity for over 57,000 pesticides regulated under federal law.”
Bayer contends that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), the federal law governing pesticides, preempts any state-level claims that the chemical company didn’t add warnings to labels about Roundup’s possible health risks.
The company claims that states can’t require warnings that the EPA hasn’t required or approved.
Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, has already paid more than $10 billion to resolve lawsuits filed against Monsanto before the acquisition. The company still faces more than 60,000 lawsuits nationally.
“Chemical companies that push our government to not be a ‘nanny state like Europe’ with regulations should not then expect our government to bail them out of lawsuits when they have not regulated themselves,” Zen Honeycutt, executive director of Moms Across America, told The Defender.
“All Bayer needed to do was reformulate for safety or accurately label their product with a cancer warning,” she said. “Instead, they are wasting valuable resources on a lengthy court case. One wonders if they are willing to do this because a former Monsanto employee, Clarence Thompson, is a Supreme Court Justice and will serve them instead of Americans.”
Bayer said in a statement that it welcomes the news. It said it was “an important step in our multi-pronged strategy to significantly contain this litigation.”
Trump throws support behind Bayer
The Trump administration submitted an amicus brief urging the court to hear the case and arguing that FIFRA likely preempts states from making their own labeling requirements.
The president’s support drew fire from MAHA activists, who oppose liability protection for chemical makers.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued in the brief that allowing states to impose different labeling requirements would “undermine” the national regulatory system.
This is the third time Bayer has asked the court to hear Roundup cases that it lost in lower courts. This latest appeal comes after the Missouri Supreme Court declined to hear Bayer’s appeal.
Different circuit courts have provided conflicting decisions on the issue, according to Bayer and the Trump administration.
But according to Baum:
“Monsanto claims courts are split on whether federal law prevents cancer warnings. They’re not. The one court that Monsanto relies on ‘expressed no opinion’ on whether Monsanto had a duty to ask EPA for an updated label. Monsanto [Bayer] has never tried to add a cancer warning to Roundup.”
In the case that the court will hear, Monsanto v. Durnell, John Durnell — a St. Louis gardener who used Roundup for decades — was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2019.
Durnell sued the company, alleging that his cancer resulted from chronic exposure to Roundup and that the company should have warned consumers of the cancer risk. Monsanto argues it didn’t need to add a warning because the EPA doesn’t require it.
R. Brent Wisner, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told The New York Times that if the court were to rule in favor of Bayer, it would make pesticide manufacturers “a special class of corporations in our society that receive special treatment.”
The court has not announced a date to hear oral arguments.
Bayer denies cancer claims despite growing evidence
Bayer maintains that glyphosate, formerly the key ingredient in Roundup, is not linked to cancer and that the EPA has consistently concluded the chemical is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”
However, a growing body of evidence has linked glyphosate to cancer, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded the herbicide was “probably carcinogenic.”
In November 2025, a major scientific study that regulators around the world relied on for decades to justify continued approval of glyphosate was quietly retracted over serious ethical issues. The issues included accusations that Monsanto employees secretly wrote all or part of the paper. The retraction raised questions about the pesticide-approval process in the U.S. and globally.
The editors who retracted the paper also found that the article ignored “multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies” that were available at the time.
A handful of states, including California, have set stricter rules on how Roundup is used. Hundreds of thousands of farmworkers and others who got cancer after being exposed to the chemical have brought cases — many successful — arguing that Bayer should have warned consumers of the risk through a label change.
The litigation so far has compelled Bayer to remove glyphosate from Roundup sold to consumers, but not the commercial version used by Big Ag. Bayer swapped out glyphosate for four other chemicals, two of which are banned in the European Union.
Bayer and allies also pursuing legislation to grant the same protections
Earlier this month, Bayer and its pesticide industry allies suffered a major setback when a broad bipartisan coalition of food and environmental health advocates forced federal lawmakers to remove a provision tucked into a congressional appropriations bill that would have achieved the same outcome as Bayer hopes to achieve with its lawsuit.
Language tacked on to an earlier version of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s bill blocked federal funds from being used to make any policies, take regulatory action or change labeling that was inconsistent with EPA human health assessments.
Critics who mobilized to block the language, represented by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), ranking member of the U.S. House Appropriations Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, said it would have hindered states from mandating warnings about health risks from pesticides even in the face of new scientific evidence.
New EPA assessments can take more than a decade.
When the 2026 spending bill hit the floor for a full congressional vote, the language had been stripped from the bill, despite what Pingree told The Guardian was “intensive lobbying by Bayer.”
Bayer also created a lobbying group, the Modern Ag Alliance, which has been pushing for laws at the state level to make it harder for consumers to sue over pesticide risks. The state laws would shield Bayer from future lawsuits and potentially nullify at least some of the 61,000 active claims against the company.
So far, Georgia and North Dakota have passed liability shield laws that declare the EPA has oversight of pesticide labeling and that state laws can’t hold the companies liable for failing to warn about anything not required by the EPA.
Prominent food safety and regenerative agriculture advocate Elizabeth Kucinich told The Defender that the industry is also pushing for a similar measure to be written into the pending Farm Bill, which will be considered this legislative session.
Glenn Thompson (R-Pa.), chair of the House Agriculture Committee, has said protecting pesticide companies from lawsuits is a top priority for the Farm Bill.
Thompson received more than $600,000 in campaign contributions from the crop production and agricultural processing industries in 2024, according to Open Secrets.
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