Supreme Court sets April hearing for Roundup preemption case
The US Supreme Court has set an April hearing in a closely watched case brought by Bayer that seeks to make the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the ultimate arbiter of warning labels on pesticides such as the company’s popular Roundup weed killer.
Bayer has said that getting a favorable ruling from the high court is key to quashing costly nationwide litigation brought by people claiming Roundup and other Bayer herbicides caused them to develop cancer.
The Supreme Court noted in a docket entry that a hearing on the case is scheduled for April 27.
Bayer has been fending off over 100,000 lawsuits since buying Monsanto in 2018 and so far has paid more than $11 billion in settlements and jury verdicts to tens of thousands of people suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL) they blame on exposure to Roundup and other Monsanto glyphosate-based herbicide brands. At the core of those lawsuits are claims that the company failed to warn users of the risk of cancer.
Bayer maintains its glyphosate herbicides do not cause cancer and argues that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) which governs the registration, distribution, sale, and use of pesticides in the United States, preempts failure-to-warn claims against the company. Because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved labels with no cancer warning, failure-to-warn lawsuits should be barred, the company maintains.
The Trump administration is siding with Bayer on the issue, and encouraged the Supreme Court to hear the case.
Multiple courts have rejected Bayer’s argument, including two appellate courts, ruling that FIFRA does not preempt failure-to-warn claims, though one appellate court – the Third Circuit Court of Appeals- found in favor of Bayer.
The Roundup litigation began in 2015 after the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization, reviewed years of independent research on glyphosate and Roundup, and found the weed killer to be a “probable human carcinogen.”
Alongside its path through the courts, Bayer has also been pushing for new state and federal legislation that would effectively preempt lawsuits based on failure-to-warn claims.
