Supreme Court Blocks Thousands of Roundup Cancer Suits Against Bayer in 7-2 Ruling.

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 on June 25, 2026, that federal pesticide law shields Bayer from state lawsuits claiming its Roundup weedkiller caused cancer without a warning label. The decision in Monsanto v. Durnell throws out the legal theory behind thousands of pending cancer claims, PBS reported.

What the Court Decided

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, held that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts state failure-to-warn claims when the EPA has made a definitive safety determination. Because the EPA considers glyphosate safe when used as directed and has never required a cancer warning, the Court ruled a state jury cannot punish Bayer for leaving one off.

The case began with John Durnell, who blamed his cancer on years of Roundup exposure. A Missouri jury agreed and awarded him more than $1 million in 2019. That verdict is now void.

The Safety Finding Behind the Ruling Was Struck Down

The majority’s logic rests on the EPA’s conclusion that glyphosate is “not likely” to cause cancer. A federal appeals court rejected that conclusion.

In 2022, the Ninth Circuit found multiple flaws in the EPA’s analysis, vacated the human-health portion of its glyphosate assessment, and ordered the agency to redo it. The EPA then withdrew the decision. A decade earlier, the World Health Organization’s cancer agency reached the opposite result, classifying glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” The ruling gives a safety finding that a court already struck down the force of a permanent liability shield.

A Dissent That Crossed the Court’s Usual Lines

The dissent paired two justices who rarely vote together. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote it, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Federal preemption of state law is one of the few questions where a justice worried about corporate immunity and a justice skeptical of sweeping federal power can land on the same side. Their objection was that Congress did not clearly strip the states of the power to let injured people sue.

The Numbers Behind the Litigation

Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018 and inherited the Roundup lawsuits along with it. It has paid roughly $11 billion to settle more than 100,000 claims, and in February 2026 it proposed another $7.25 billion to resolve current and future non-Hodgkin lymphoma cases.

170,000 Roundup cancer claims have been filed against Monsanto and Bayer. The ruling guts the failure-to-warn theory behind most of them.

This Fight Crosses Party Lines

Shielding pesticide makers is not a one-party cause. Bayer and the industry have pushed state immunity laws, and Georgia and North Dakota passed them in 2025, making a federal label a complete defense to failure-to-warn claims.

But the Make America Healthy Again movement aligned with Trump fought those provisions. When the industry tried to attach pesticide immunity to the Farm Bill, an amendment to strip it, led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna and backed by more than 70 House Republicans and nearly every Democrat, passed. The Court’s ruling now delivers through the courts what that bipartisan coalition blocked in Congress.

What You Can Do Now

Use the letter below to ask Congress to pass legislation making clear that federal pesticide law does not preempt state failure-to-warn claims, so people harmed by a product can still take its maker to court.
Call your members of Congress at (202) 224-3121 and ask them to keep pesticide immunity out of the Farm Bill and every spending bill. A bipartisan majority already voted to strip it once. Tell them to hold that line.
Ask your representatives to demand the EPA finally complete the glyphosate cancer reassessment a federal court ordered in 2022. The safety finding the Supreme Court relied on has not been redone.