Plaintiffs have filed tens of thousands of lawsuits in state courts alleging that Monsanto’s Roundup weed-killer gave them cancer. The Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates pesticides, has evaluated glyphosate over five decades and concluded it doesn’t cause cancer.
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While mass torts are a broad business scourge, the glyphosate lawsuits also subvert the regulatory scheme that Congress created for pesticides. …
Congress passed the pre-emption law in 1972 because states were enacting a patchwork of conflicting labeling regimes that interfered with interstate commerce. …
Plaintiff attorneys are trying to subvert the law. The case before the High Court involves Missouri plaintiff John Durnell, who was awarded $1.25 million in damages. Monsanto appealed, arguing that his claim is pre-empted by federal law.
Since EPA has determined that glyphosate isn’t carcinogenic, adding a cancer warning without EPA approval would have resulted in illegal misbranding of the product.
As Monsanto stresses, “the verdict in Durnell’s favor on his failure-to-warn claim necessarily required the jury to find that state law required Monsanto to include in Roundup’s label a warning that EPA has deemed unsupported and unnecessary under FIFRA [Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act] .”
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Perhaps this is why the Roundup plaintiffs pivoted to a novel argument in their brief for the Supreme Court.
They now assert that federal pre-emption of state torts somehow runs afoul of the Court’s Loper Bright precedent (2024), which overturned so-called Chevron deference by holding that judges need not defer to regulatory agencies’ interpretation of laws. They claim Monsanto wants the EPA, not judges, to interpret the pesticide law.
On the contrary. Monsanto wants judges to interpret the law as written—since it expressly pre-empts state regulation.
