By Diana Novak Jones
-The U.S. Supreme Court asked President Donald Trump’s administration on Monday for its views on Bayer’s bid to sharply limit lawsuits claiming that the company’s Roundup weedkiller causes cancer and potentially avert billions of dollars in damages.
Bayer has asked the justices to hear its appeal of a lower court’s decision to uphold a $1.25 million verdict awarded by a St. Louis jury in a case in Missouri state court in which a plaintiff named John Durnell sued after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma he attributed to his exposure to Roundup.
The Supreme Court asked the Justice Department for its views on whether the justices should take up the appeal.
The Missouri Court of Appeals rejected the German pharmaceutical and biotechnology company’s contention that federal law governing pesticides bars lawsuits like Durnell’s making claims under state laws. Bayer is facing more than 67,000 such lawsuits in U.S. state and federal courts. Other federal and state appellate courts have made similar rulings.
Roundup is among the most widely used weedkillers in the United States.
Bayer is arguing that consumers should not be able to sue it under state law for failing to warn that Roundup increases cancer risk because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has found no such risk and requires no such warning. Bayer argued that federal law does not allow it to add any warning to the product beyond the EPA-approved label.
The company appealed the verdict in Durnell’s case to the Missouri Court of Appeals.
Lawyers for Durnell asked the Supreme Court to turn away Bayer’s appeal. They said the plaintiff relied on Bayer’s advertising and not just the label when he chose to use Roundup, and the company’s marketing failed to warn consumers of the product’s risks.
The company has paid about $10 billion to settle most of the Roundup lawsuits that were pending as of 2020, but failed to get a settlement covering future cases. New lawsuits have continued to pour in since then. Plaintiffs have said they developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other forms of cancer due to using Roundup, either at home or on the job.
Bayer, which acquired Roundup as part of its $63 billion purchase of agrochemical company Monsanto in 2018, has said that decades of studies have shown Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, are safe for human use.
The company has had a mixed record at trial in the Roundup lawsuits. Bayer has prevailed in a series of Roundup trials, but it was also hit with large jury awards in the past few years, including a $2.1 billion verdict in a case in the U.S. state of Georgia in March.
Bayer has asked the Supreme Court to consider the Roundup litigation before, but was rebuffed in 2022. Since then, one federal appeals court agreed with the company in a split from other appeals courts.
Bayer has threatened to withdraw Roundup from the U.S. market as it fights the litigation. The company replaced glyphosate in U.S. consumer products with different weedkilling substances.
(Reporting by Diana Novak Jones in Chicago; Editing by Will Dunham)
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