The Supreme Court’s Durnell decision strengthens federal control over pesticide warning labels.
Glyphosate, for decades the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller, is the most widely used herbicide in the world. There is general agreement that it kills weeds effectively and general disagreement as to whether it also kills people.
Across administrations, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has consistently determined that glyphosate is not a carcinogen. In February, President Donald J. Trump charged the Secretary of Agriculture with taking all steps necessary to encourage the production and use of glyphosate-based herbicides. But several stakeholders disagree: those marching under the Make America Healthy Again banner, including “Glyphosate Girl,” have called for limits on agricultural glyphosate use; the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer declared glyphosate a probable carcinogen; and California has placed glyphosate on its Proposition 65 list of chemicals “known to the state of California to cause cancer.” And a dozen juries in state court tort actions—the first of which included the now Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the plaintiff’s legal team—have concluded that exposure to Roundup caused the plaintiffs’ cancer and have awarded significant damages against Monsanto for failure to warn of the risks.
The Roundup lawsuits are all state-law claims brought under common-law tort theories—particularly failure-to-warn—or consumer protection laws. Monsanto has settled more than 100,000 of these claims for a total of about $11 billion; some 65,000 state suits are pending, along with 4,000 federal lawsuits based on state-law theories that have been consolidated in a multidistrict litigation. New claims continue to be filed. A global settlement for $7.25 billion in the Missouri class action King v. Monsanto has received the judge’s preliminary approval and is set for a hearing on August 19, 2026.
John Durnell had used Roundup for two decades when he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He sued Monsanto in Missouri state court alleging that his cancer was caused by exposure to glyphosate. Durnell relied on multiple legal theories, but the key, and successful, one was failure to warn. A jury awarded $1.25 million in damages. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed.
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