WASHINGTON – John Durnell spent roughly two decades using Roundup on his property and developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A Missouri jury concluded he was owed $1.25 million. The Supreme Court on Thursday concluded otherwise.
In a 7-2 ruling written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court held that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts state failure-to-warn claims against Bayer BAYN, which means state juries cannot require a cancer warning on Roundup’s label when the Environmental Protection Agency has not required one. The decision does not address whether glyphosate causes cancer. It addresses who gets to decide what the label must say, and it settles that question firmly in favor of federal regulators over state courts.
Bayer’s shares surged 16% in Frankfurt trading on Thursday, the biggest single-day gain the company has recorded in years, an immediate accounting of what the ruling lifts. The company had fought more than 100,000 Roundup lawsuits since inheriting the liability through its $63 billion acquisition of Monsanto in 2018, paying out well over $10 billion in settlements and verdicts. According to Bayer’s official announcement, Thursday’s ruling should help significantly contain the Roundup litigation after nearly a decade of legal battles and result in the dismissal of current failure-to-warn claims while barring new ones.
The legal question at the center of the case is narrow but consequential. FIFRA, the federal pesticide statute, prohibits states from imposing labeling requirements “in addition to or different from” federal requirements. What Durnell’s case raised was whether a state tort judgment requiring a cancer warning, when the EPA has approved a label without one, constitutes such an addition. The majority said yes. The EPA’s approval of Roundup’s existing label is itself an affirmative federal requirement; a state jury verdict demanding a different warning imposes something “in addition to” it. That logic, once established, applies to any state failure-to-warn claim premised on label content the EPA has explicitly reviewed and not required.
The two dissenters, Justice Neil Gorsuch and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, argued that FIFRA was never designed to insulate manufacturers from state tort liability and that the majority’s reading effectively turns federal regulatory inaction into a liability shield. Their concern has a practical dimension: federal agencies do not always move quickly, do not always have adequate resources to evaluate every new piece of scientific evidence, and have been subject to political pressure over pesticide regulation for decades. A rule that treats EPA approval as the ceiling on consumer protection, they suggested, makes that agency’s decisions consequential in ways Congress did not clearly authorize.
Outside the Roundup context, as CNBC reported, legal analysts flagged Thursday’s ruling as precedent that will move through litigation in the pharmaceutical, medical-device, cosmetic, and food industries, any sector where federal labeling law contains language similar to FIFRA’s preemption clause. Medical-device makers operating under the Medical Device Amendments and pharmaceutical companies subject to FDA labeling requirements will find their attorneys examining Kavanaugh’s majority opinion closely.
The ruling also carries an unexpected political dimension. The Make America Healthy Again movement, associated with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has made pesticide regulation and glyphosate specifically a central concern. Thursday’s decision effectively makes it harder for individuals harmed by chemicals to seek compensation through state courts when federal regulators have not required a warning, a tension that sits uncomfortably alongside the administration’s stated interest in scrutinizing chemicals in food. That tension is not resolved by Thursday’s ruling. The EPA’s ongoing review of glyphosate’s safety status continues independently of the preemption decision.
The prior history of Roundup litigation offers useful context. In 2020, Bayer’s Roundup settlement paid $39.6 million over claims that Monsanto had obscured health risks in Roundup’s marketing, addressing different legal claims than the failure-to-warn argument the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday. The preemption ruling does not undo prior settlements; it forecloses the claim structure that generated most of the verdicts driving the remaining litigation.
What the ruling does not do is resolve the underlying scientific question. Whether long-term exposure to glyphosate causes non-Hodgkin lymphoma remains genuinely contested. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic” in 2015; the EPA has maintained it is not likely carcinogenic when used as directed. That disagreement was not before the court. The court ruled on the label.
John Durnell will not receive the award a jury concluded he was owed. Thousands of people with similar diagnoses and similar histories will find that the legal path available to them has narrowed. Bayer’s shares closed sharply higher. The preemption question is settled. The question of what Roundup does to the human body is not.
