Bayer Gets Supreme Court Hearing in Challenge to Roundup Suits

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Bayer AG’s appeal taking aim at thousands of lawsuits targeting its top-selling Roundup weedkiller for causing cancer.

The high court agreed Friday to hear Bayer’s challenge to a $1.25 million Missouri jury verdict over Roundup on the grounds some of the claims in the 2023 case were preempted by federal law. Bayer officials hope the justices’ ruling will help knock out thousands of Roundup cases that include failure-to-warn claims.

Roundup litigation has troubled the German conglomerate since it bought Monsanto for $66 billion and inherited a string of suits that have cast a cloud over its shares. The company already has paid more than $10 billion in verdicts and settlements over the herbicide and its active ingredient, glyphosate.

Bayer shares gained about 80% last year as investors bet on a turnaround, although they remain far below their level prior to the Monsanto deal.

The Supreme Court took Bayer’s appeal after seeking the Trump administration’s views on whether it should hear the case. Last month, US Solicitor General D. John Sauer recommended the justices review Bayer’s legal arguments that federal law governing approved pesticides supersedes state law when it comes to juries hearing claims the company failed to properly warn consumers about Roundup’s cancer risks.

Lower appellate courts have ruled differently on the preemption issue over the last several years. The high court’s decision is likely to address the split among the courts.

Bayer appealed the verdict after jurors in Missouri state court ordered the company’s Monsanto unit to pay damages to cancer patient John Durnell in October 2023.

After seven years of fighting Roundup cases in the US, Bayer is still facing about 67,000 claims from plaintiffs who allege that long-term exposure to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, caused their cancer. Bayer insists the weedkiller is safe.

The litigation has cast such a pall over Bayer that Chief Executive Officer Bill Anderson has said he’s weighing whether to stop making glyphosate altogether. The company recently settled a $2.1 billion verdict handed down by a state-court jury in Georgia. Terms of the accord weren’t disclosed.

Bayer argued to the nation’s highest court that failure-to-warn claims brought in state court must yield to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s decision not to force Bayer to put a cancer warning on Roundup. Bayer began replacing its glyphosate-based version of the product for residential users with a different formulation in 2022.

Many large verdicts against Bayer and Monsanto have been based, in part, on failure-to-warn allegations. The language of each state’s laws governing the claim vary, but Bayer contends the preemption issue supplants all of them.

The German company has struggled to deal with the current and projected future caseload of Roundup suits. Bayer has said publicly it already has resolved more than 130,000 cases, either by settlement or having judges throw them out. It also has set aside another $6 billion to deal with Roundup cases.

The case is Monsanto v. Durnell, 24-1068.