Bayer’s Monsanto unit stood before a Missouri judge on Monday and asked him to approve a $7.25 billion settlement of roughly 65,000 lawsuits claiming its Roundup weed killer causes cancer. Judge Timothy Boyer heard arguments from both sides in St. Louis and didn’t rule from the bench. But the settlement he’s weighing already looks different from what it did in May. That’s because the Supreme Court spent its June term teaching a lesson most of us learned in eighth-grade civics and then promptly forgot: When federal law and state law collide, federal law wins. It’s called the supremacy clause, and it just did more to reshape Roundup litigation than any jury verdict could.
The case is Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, decided 7-2 on June 25. A Missouri jury had awarded John Durnell $1.25 million after he blamed his non-Hodgkin lymphoma on Roundup and argued the label should have carried a cancer warning. The interesting part, and a good fact for your next dinner party, is who signed on to reverse that verdict. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, as you’d expect, but also by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. The dissent came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court’s most reliable textualist, siding against Monsanto. Nobody’s ideological bingo card called that one.
You could watch that lesson land in real time on Monday. Hunter Shkolnik, an attorney representing 3,000 Roundup plaintiffs, told Boyer that 800 to 900 of his own clients had planned to opt out of the settlement and take their chances in court, then reconsidered once Durnell came down and cut off the failure-to-warn theory their cases relied on. Monsanto’s lawyer, James Bennett, summed up the company’s leverage in eight words: “This is the settlement. There is not another settlement.” Objectors pushed back anyway. T. Roe Frazer argued that payouts capped at $165,000, with few claimants ever reaching that ceiling, can’t account for a population in which roughly 80% of Americans carry some glyphosate exposure. Frazer may have a point on the arithmetic. But Durnell is the reason Bayer gets to negotiate from a position that strong in the first place, and it’s why several hundred plaintiffs who meant to walk away from this deal decided to sign it instead.
Here’s the plain-English version. The Environmental Protection Agency has reviewed glyphosate, Roundup’s active ingredient, more times than I’ve reviewed a hedge fund’s offering memorandum, and it keeps concluding the stuff isn’t likely to cause cancer. So, the EPA never required a cancer warning on the label. FIFRA, the federal pesticide law, says states can’t impose labeling requirements “in addition to or different from” what the EPA requires. The court held that a state jury verdict counts as exactly that kind of requirement. If a Missouri jury can force Monsanto to add a warning the EPA rejected, and a California jury could reach the opposite result next month, you don’t have 50 states regulating pesticides. You have 50 pesticide labels, and one company trying to comply with all of them at once.
That’s precisely the chaos the supremacy clause was written to prevent. Article VI makes federal law “the supreme Law of the Land,” and Congress used that authority to write FIFRA’s preemption clause under a section literally titled “Uniformity.” The framers had watched states print their own currency and tax each other’s goods under the Articles of Confederation. They didn’t want a country where a product is legal in Kansas and a liability landmine in Missouri, or where a label acceptable to federal regulators becomes a $1.25 million verdict the moment it crosses a state line. Durnell isn’t really about weed killer. It’s a rerun of that same argument, and the Constitution’s answer hasn’t changed.
I spend my working life advising investors and testifying as an expert witness in cases where a single unpredictable jury verdict can move a company’s balance sheet by billions. That’s not hyperbole here. Bayer’s litigation reserves have climbed past 11 billion euros, and its stock has traded on Roundup headlines for years. The court’s opinion leans on Riegel v. Medtronic, its 2008 medical-device preemption ruling, and signals that the same reasoning applies to drugs, cosmetics, and other federally labeled products. Every general counsel in that footprint just got a clearer rulebook, and every mass-tort firm just got a weaker hand walking into settlement talks like the one in St. Louis.
THE CENSUS IS A SUBSIDY FOR OPEN BORDERS DRESSED UP AS DEMOGRAPHY
To be fair to the plaintiffs, the ruling isn’t a blanket shield. The court preempted only the failure-to-warn theory tied to the label. Design-defect, negligent-testing, and manufacturing claims can still proceed, and the EPA is due to finish an updated glyphosate risk review by the end of this year, so the science isn’t frozen either. If the EPA changes its mind, Congress and the agency, not a Missouri courtroom, are still the ones who get to decide.
Monday’s hearing happened in the shadow of a ruling that took away plaintiffs’ strongest argument and handed regulatory predictability back to Washington instead of leaving it to whichever county courthouse draws the most sympathetic jury pool. Boyer gave no timeline for a decision. Whenever he rules, the math in that courtroom already shifted in June, and it isn’t shifting back. That’s not a loss for accountability. It’s what accountability is supposed to look like in a country with one Constitution and one EPA, not 50 of each.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.