Court Bars Roundup Cancer Suits, Leaving Farmworkers Exposed

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 on June 25 that federal pesticide law bars state-court cancer lawsuits against Monsanto, effectively ending the legal campaigns of thousands of farmers, farmworkers, and landscapers who say decades of Roundup exposure gave them non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The decision in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell rewrites the rules of accountability in agricultural chemistry — and the people left without recourse are overwhelmingly the ones who applied the chemical by hand.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, held that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) expressly preempts any state-law claim that would impose labeling requirements “in addition to or different from” what the EPA has already approved. Because a failure-to-warn lawsuit in state court effectively demands a different label — one that says “this product may cause cancer” — the majority concluded such claims are prohibited under federal law. EPA approval, in the Court’s reading, is a ceiling, not a floor.

The plaintiff, John Durnell of Missouri, had spent years applying Roundup on his property before his cancer diagnosis. His case became the vehicle for a legal question the industry had been pressing for years: does EPA approval of a pesticide label immunize the manufacturer from state-court liability? The answer is now yes.

What FIFRA Preemption Means in Practice

FIFRA was written in 1947 and has been amended several times, but its core purpose was to establish uniform national rules for pesticide registration and labeling. The EPA registers pesticides and approves their labels after reviewing efficacy and safety data submitted — largely — by the manufacturers themselves. Critics have long noted this creates a system where the agency depends on industry science to make public-health decisions.

Before Wednesday’s ruling, state tort law provided an independent check. If a company’s EPA-approved label omitted a known risk, injured plaintiffs could go to state court and argue the label was inadequate. Juries in California, Missouri, and elsewhere sided with them repeatedly — including a 2019 California jury verdict awarding $2 billion that sent Bayer’s stock into a years-long rut.

That check is now gone. The only path to accountability runs through the EPA — an agency with a contested record on glyphosate safety and limited resources to revisit approved registrations.

Dissent: “Without a Remedy”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch. Her argument was direct: the majority misreads FIFRA and, in doing so, leaves Durnell — and every person like him — with no legal recourse for injuries a jury might otherwise find compensable. The dissent matters not only for its legal reasoning but for its honest description of what the ruling does to real people. “The Court leaves Durnell without a remedy for the significant harms he has suffered,” Jackson wrote.

For the agricultural workforce, Jackson’s point lands hard. H-2A guestworkers and domestic farmworkers already face systemic barriers to legal redress — wage theft, unsafe housing, heat exposure. Many lack health insurance and face retaliation for raising safety concerns. Litigation was never easy for them, but it was at least theoretically available. The Court has now foreclosed it.

Who Uses Roundup, and Why It Matters

Glyphosate is the most widely applied herbicide in U.S. agriculture, sprayed on corn, soybeans, wheat, and cotton — the backbone crops of American farming. The people who apply it most are not executives in Bayer’s Leverkusen headquarters. They are hired laborers in the Central Valley, contract applicators in the Corn Belt, and small-scale farmers mixing tank loads in the pre-dawn hours before a spray window closes.

Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is a blood cancer. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic” in 2015, a finding the EPA has disputed while acknowledging the science remains contested. That scientific dispute used to play out partly in courtrooms, where plaintiffs could present their evidence and juries could weigh it. Now it plays out only in regulatory comment periods — a process with far less visibility and far less power for ordinary people.

The ruling also lands in a broader agricultural chemical landscape that is increasingly contaminated with PFAS compounds from pesticide applications and sewage sludge. Roundup is not an isolated concern; it sits inside a system of farm chemistry where exposure is cumulative, oversight is slow, and the companies that profit are consolidating fast.

What Comes Next

Bayer, which acquired Monsanto for $63 billion in 2018 and inherited its Roundup liability, has spent roughly $11 billion settling glyphosate claims over the past five years. Those settlements are now largely behind it. The ruling cuts off the pipeline of new state-court cases — estimated at more than 3,000 pending — before they can reach juries.

The immediate legal landscape: plaintiffs whose cases rest on failure-to-warn theories under state law are out. Cases premised on other theories — design defect, express warranty — may survive, but legal experts expect those to be narrowed aggressively on remand.

The longer political landscape is murkier. Some congressional members have floated federal compensation mechanisms for pesticide-exposed workers, similar to the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund model. That would require legislation. Meanwhile the EPA’s glyphosate re-registration — which could add or tighten label requirements through the federal process the Court just declared supreme — remains years away from completion.

The Supreme Court has handed manufacturers a durable shield. For the people who spray what those manufacturers sell, the courthouse door has closed — and the next one to open, if it opens at all, will be in Washington.

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Related: The same preemption doctrine is rippling through other pesticide liability cases, and the farmworker workforce already facing dangerous conditions with limited recourse is documented in our H-2A labor crisis reporting.