Jun 26, 2026
A Supreme Court decision on Thursday handed a huge win to agriculture and pharmaceutical company Bayer and its investors, while drawing disdain from opponents who say it gives chemical manufacturers free rein to operate outside of the interests of public health.
In a 7-2 ruling, SCOTUS declared that Bayer cannot be held responsible for failing to comply with state laws governing label warnings about chemicals that may cause cancer on its Roundup weedkiller because federal law doesn’t require it.
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The decision reverses a lower Missouri court ruling in favor of a St. Louis man named John Durnell, who said he developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from 20 years of exposure to the chemical glyphosate used in Roundup. He’d won $1.25 million in the decision.
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Durnell’s case, meanwhile, was one of an estimated 100,000 lawsuits filed in recent years against Bayer — and Monsanto, the previous owner of Roundup — that have already paid out roughly $11 billion in settlements to those who claim the weedkiller led to them developing cancer. Another 65,000 such lawsuits remain unresolved, though the SCOTUS ruling is expected to essentially put an end to those. Bayer, meanwhile, reportedly plans to move ahead to settle them with a deal worth $7.25 billion.
A Bayer statement following the decision called it “good for science, farmers, and industries that depend on regulatory clarity for innovation,” while Tarah Heinzen, of the advocacy group Food and Water Watch, told Reuters the ruling is “a disaster for public health.”
Other than Bayer, the other immediate winners in the decision were their investors, who watched the company’s stock jump faster than it had in more than two decades, topping out on Thursday morning at more than 24% over the previous week.
When federal and state laws clash
The National Pesticide Information Center notes that glyphosate “is one of the most widely used herbicides with applications in agriculture, forestry, industrial weed control, lawn, garden, and aquatic environments” — including major uses in corn and soybean farming.
One of the problems with the chemical is that experts can’t agree on whether it actually causes cancer. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says it doesn’t, while the World Health Organization says it does.
But in the U.S., the EPA wins out. As a result, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) that the EPA uses to oversee the regulation of pesticides says that Roundup doesn’t require a warning label about potential cancer risks.
The question, then, in state courts, became whether Roundup was misbranded. Plaintiffs like Durnell and others claimed it is and that Bayer failed to warn about the health risks. Bayer contends it isn’t because the EPA deemed it safe.
Durnell had previously won his case against Bayer in Missouri state court in 2023 and then again when the company appealed, upholding his $1.25 million verdict.
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But the Supreme Court ruled that because the EPA is a federal agency, its rule should take precedence over state laws.
Now 75, Durnell told the Associated Press that, while his cancer is in remission, “there are thousands of cases that are like [his] that will not see court now. So that is the biggest disappointment for [him].”
The legal battle, meanwhile, happened against a backdrop of a Republican draft farm bill from February, which Chemical and Engineering News wrote preempts “state and local governments from requiring warnings that differ from those approved by the (EPA).”
As well, around the same time President Trump issued an executive order calling the U.S. production of glyphosate-based herbicides “central to American economic and national security.”
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What consumers need to know
Opponents of the Supreme Court decision — which range from across the political spectrum — fear that Thursday’s ruling could make it easier for manufacturers to include harmful chemicals in products used by Americans everyday.
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Bloomberg, for example, noted that industries like food and cosmetics “are governed by laws similar to the one at the core of the Bayer case,” illustrating the potentially wide reach of such a ruling.
Kelly Ryerson, an activist and supporter of the Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-led Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, told Reuters that the SCOTUS ruling “will perpetuate our cancer, infertility and general chronic disease epidemic for generations to come.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, one of the two dissenting SCOTUS justices alongside Neil Gorsuch, called the decision “both remarkable and regrettable,” while Christopher Seeger, an attorney representing a person who says they became ill after using Roundup, told the Associated Press that the ruling “slams the courthouse door on Americans sickened by pesticides.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by numerous legal representatives in a brief filed ahead of the SCOTUS decision, which advised that state tort law “actively supports and supplements” FIFRA’s rules. They added that with 57,000 FIFRA-registered pesticides, “the EPA cannot continuously monitor every one or anticipate every risk,” thus leaving state tort law “among the few mechanisms available to surface those risks and protect the public.”
The brief also provided an ominous warning that overruling state court decisions would “shield manufacturers from any accountability for marketing unsafe products, incentivizing them to use their resources to pressure regulatory agencies … instead of compensating injured consumers or improving the safety of their products.”
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Mike Crisolago is a Sr. Staff Reporter at Moneywise with nearly 20 years of experience working as a journalist, editor, content strategist and podcast host. He specializes in personal finance writing related to the 50-plus demographic and retirement, as well as politics and lifestyle content.
