The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a federal pesticide law bars a state-law lawsuit against Monsanto over the failure to warn of cancer risks on the label of its Roundup weed killer. According to the coverage of the opinion as it was handed down, it was the first decision released by the justices on an opinion day on which several major cases were still awaited, and it landed as one of the rulings the court delivered late in its term.
The decision came in the case of Monsanto Company versus Durnell. According to the report, the plaintiff, identified in the case as Durnell, had brought a claim tied to his use of Roundup and the argument that the product should have carried a warning about cancer risks, putting at the center of the dispute the question of who decides whether a pesticide label must carry such a warning.
At the heart of the case was a question of federal preemption. According to the coverage, the justices had to decide whether the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the federal statute that regulates the use, sale and labeling of pesticides, bars a lawsuit that accuses Monsanto, the maker of Roundup, of failing to include a warning on the label about the risks of cancer.
The role of the federal regulator was a key part of the dispute. According to the report, the Environmental Protection Agency did not require Monsanto to include a cancer warning on the Roundup label, and the agency has said that the active ingredient in the weed killer does not cause cancer, a position that fed into the argument over whether a state-law failure-to-warn claim could stand.
In its ruling, the court sided with the company on the preemption question. According to the coverage, the justices held that the federal pesticide law preempts the plaintiff's claim brought under state law, a conclusion described as meaning that the federal statute governing pesticide labels bars the lawsuit against Monsanto from proceeding on that basis.
The outcome was decided by a clear but not unanimous margin. According to the report, the court ruled 7-2, with the majority opinion written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, while Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented and was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, an unusual pairing that underlined the legal rather than purely ideological lines along which the case divided the bench.