The Supreme Court glyphosate lawsuit 2026 everyone in agriculture has been watching arrives Monday. On April 27, the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, a case with the potential to reshape pesticide liability law across the entire country. At the center is John Durnell, a Missouri man who won a $1.25 million jury award after alleging that exposure to Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate caused his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He says Monsanto failed to adequately warn him of the cancer risk. Bayer, which owns Monsanto, is asking the Court to overturn that verdict and dismiss tens of thousands of similar cases.
The core legal question is whether the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act — the federal law governing pesticide labeling — preempts state failure-to-warn claims. Bayer argues it does. The company’s position is simple: the EPA has repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer and has not required a cancer warning on Roundup’s label. “Once EPA makes that judgment, the label is the law,” Bayer said in its Supreme Court brief. If the justices agree, it would effectively end not just Roundup lawsuits, but potentially all state-level failure-to-warn claims against any pesticide manufacturer whose product the EPA has approved without a warning.
Supreme Court glyphosate lawsuit 2026 could shield Bayer from billions in liability — or expose it further
Since 2015, more than 100,000 lawsuits have been filed against Monsanto alleging that Roundup caused cancer. Some jury verdicts have exceeded $2 billion. Bayer has proposed a multibillion-dollar settlement to address ongoing and future cases. The company has already removed glyphosate-based Roundup from residential lawn and garden applications. CropLife America, the pesticide industry trade group, warned the Supreme Court that if state jury verdicts are allowed to continue, the litigation threat could drive glyphosate off the commercial agricultural market entirely — an outcome it called “devastating to U.S. agricultural production.” Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in American farming, central to the Roundup Ready system used on the vast majority of U.S. corn and soybean acres.
Durnell’s lawyers counter that his claim is consistent with federal law, which also prohibits misleading or inadequate labeling. There is a notable twist in this specific case: unlike most Roundup plaintiffs, Durnell bases his claim not on Roundup’s label but on Monsanto’s marketing materials from the 1990s and 2000s — advertisements that portrayed the product as completely safe, showing users applying it in shorts and a t-shirt. Because FIFRA governs labeling rather than marketing, his lawyers argue his claim falls outside the scope of federal preemption entirely. For more on the farm bill provisions that could also affect pesticide preemption law, Agroinformacion covered the farm bill debate including controversial pesticide liability provisions in the House draft.
A divided appeals court landscape pushed this case to the Supreme Court
Federal and state appeals courts have split sharply on the preemption question. The Third Circuit ruled that federal law does preempt state failure-to-warn claims. The Ninth and Eleventh Circuits ruled the opposite. State appellate courts in California, Oregon, and Missouri also rejected Bayer’s preemption argument. That circuit split is what prompted the Supreme Court to take the case after previously declining to hear similar appeals. The Trump administration has filed an amicus brief through the Solicitor General siding with Bayer, arguing that allowing state warning requirements would create an inconsistent patchwork across the country. Advocacy groups aligned with the Make America Healthy Again movement have filed briefs on the plaintiff’s side. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” in 2015 — a finding the EPA disputes. Oral arguments begin at 11:00 a.m. ET on April 27 and will be available to stream live from the U.S. Supreme Court website. The original report was published by American Ag Network on April 24, 2026.