Bayer Wins at the Supreme Court, and a Decade of Roundup Risk Lifts

For nearly a decade, the most encumbering thing Bayer bought when it paid $63 billion for Monsanto in 2018 was not a patent or a seed line but a courtroom problem: tens of thousands of Americans who said the weedkiller Roundup had given them cancer. On Thursday the US Supreme Court did much of the work of pricing that risk in a single stroke.

By seven votes to two, the justices threw out a $1.25 million verdict won by John Durnell, a Missouri man who blamed his non-Hodgkin lymphoma on years of spraying glyphosate, Roundup's active ingredient. The ruling in Monsanto v. Durnell does far more than erase one award. It holds that a federal statute governing pesticide labels overrides the state-law claims on which virtually the entire Roundup litigation has been built.

A label written in Washington

The case turned on the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, the law under which the Environmental Protection Agency approves what a pesticide's label must say. Once the EPA has signed off on a label carrying no cancer warning, Bayer argued, a jury in any single state cannot punish the company for failing to add one. A majority agreed.

"After EPA approves a pesticide's label at registration, manufacturers are legally required to use that label unless and until EPA approves or requires a label change and amends the pesticide's registration," wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the majority.

A state demand for a cancer warning, the court reasoned, would force a label "in addition to or different from" the one Washington had approved — exactly the patchwork that Congress meant to forbid. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, dissented, arguing that adding a warning conflicts with nothing in the federal law.

Markets exhale

Investors did not wait for the legal analysis. Bayer shares leapt as much as 17 percent in Frankfurt, the steepest intraday move since 2003, and trading was briefly halted for volatility. The reason is written into the company's own accounts: by February Bayer had lifted its litigation provisions to €11.8 billion, of which €9.6 billion was set aside for glyphosate alone. A stock long held hostage to courtrooms it could not control was, for one morning, set free.

In a statement, the company said the decision "should help significantly contain the Roundup litigation after nearly a decade of legal battles," predicting it would lead to the dismissal of current warning-based suits and bar future ones.

What the ruling does not settle

The victory is broad but not total. The decision targets failure-to-warn claims; plaintiffs may still pursue other theories. A separate $7.25 billion class settlement to resolve current and future claims awaits a final approval hearing in July.

• Vote: 7-2, majority opinion by Justice Kavanaugh; dissent by Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Gorsuch.
• Verdict vacated: $1.25 million, awarded to John Durnell in 2023.
• Bayer provisions: €11.8 billion total, €9.6 billion for glyphosate.
• Pending: a proposed $7.25 billion class settlement, more than 100,000 claims filed over the years.

A European shadow

The arguments sound familiar on this side of the Atlantic. Glyphosate is no less contested in Europe, where the European Commission renewed the chemical's licence for another ten years in late 2023 over the abstention of France and several other member states. The science the EPA leaned on — that glyphosate is not a likely human carcinogen at approved doses — broadly matches what EU regulators cited, and what the World Health Organization's cancer agency once called into question. Thursday's ruling does not resolve that dispute. It merely decides who, in America, gets to have it — and that was enough to lighten a German giant whose fortunes have been shaped more by a Missouri jury room than by any laboratory.