The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear an appeal from Bayer, the global agrochemical manufacturer, seeking to block thousands of state court lawsuits that allege the company failed to warn users its Roundup weedkiller could cause cancer. The justices will consider whether the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval of Roundup without a cancer warning should preempt those state-court claims.
The case puts the Trump administration — which has reversed the Biden administration’s position and sided with Bayer — at odds with some supporters of the Make America Healthy Again agenda who oppose granting the company the legal immunity it seeks. A ruling for Bayer could shut down roughly 181,000 pending claims from people who say glyphosate, Roundup’s key ingredient, caused their cancer.
The Missouri case
The justices took up a case from Missouri in which a jury awarded $1.25 million to a man who developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after spraying Roundup on a community garden in St. Louis.
Bayer, a Germany-based company that acquired Roundup maker Monsanto in 2018, contends the Supreme Court should intervene because lower courts have issued conflicting rulings. In 2024, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Bayer’s favor on the preemption question.
The Supreme Court in 2022 declined to hear a similar claim from Bayer arising from a California case that awarded more than $86 million to a married couple.
The regulatory dispute
The EPA has said glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans when used as directed. Some studies associate the chemical with cancer, though scientific findings have been disputed.
Bayer disputes the cancer claims. It has also moved to limit its exposure: the company has stopped using glyphosate in Roundup sold in the U.S. residential lawn and garden market. Glyphosate remains in agricultural products, where it is designed for use with genetically modified crops — including corn, soybeans and cotton — that resist the weedkiller’s effects. Bayer has said it might have to consider pulling glyphosate from U.S. agricultural markets if the lawsuits persist.
The company has set aside $16 billion to settle cases while simultaneously pursuing legislative protection. Georgia and North Dakota have passed laws barring such lawsuits.
Competing positions
Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said in a statement: “It is time for the U.S. legal system to establish that companies should not be punished under state laws for complying with federal warning label requirements.”
Environmental groups argued Bayer wants to keep juries out of the cases because it has repeatedly lost in state courts.
“It’s a sad day in America when our highest court agrees to consider depriving thousands of Roundup users suffering from cancer of their day in court,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity.
It was not immediately clear whether the case will be argued before the Supreme Court in the spring or at the start of the next term in October.