On June 25, 2026 the Supreme Court held that federal pesticide law bars a Roundup failure-to-warn claim. John Durnell had used Roundup for about twenty years, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, sued Monsanto in Missouri state court in 2019, and won $1.25 million in compensatory damages after a nine-day trial. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed. The Supreme Court reversed, seven to two. Its reasoning is narrow and mechanical: EPA approved Roundup’s label without a cancer warning, federal regulations require a manufacturer to use the label EPA approved unless the agency approves or requires a change, and a verdict demanding a cancer warning therefore imposes a labeling requirement in addition to or different from the federal one — which the uniformity clause of FIFRA forbids. Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Gorsuch, dissented, writing that the Court had departed from the view of nearly every other court to consider the argument. The decision settles who writes the label. It decides nothing about the science.
What the case was about
Durnell alleged that about twenty years of using Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and that Monsanto should have put a cancer warning on the product’s label. A St. Louis jury agreed after a nine-day trial and awarded $1.25 million in compensatory damages. The Missouri Court of Appeals affirmed, at 707 S. W. 3d 828, rejecting Monsanto’s argument that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempted the claim. The Supreme Court granted review, heard argument on April 27, 2026, and reversed.
The dispute was never about whether the warning would have been accurate. It was about whether a state jury may require a warning that the federal regulator has not required.
The holding, step by step
The majority opinion, written by Justice Kavanaugh, runs through four moves.
- To register a pesticide, EPA must approve its label — finding that the label carries every warning necessary and adequate to protect health and the environment, and that it says nothing false or misleading.
- Once EPA approves that label, federal law requires the manufacturer to use it. The label cannot change unless EPA approves a proposed change or requires one (40 CFR 156.70), and selling the product with a different label carries civil and criminal exposure.
- State tort duties count as state labeling requirements. The Court settled that in Bates v. Dow Agrosciences LLC in 2005, and the parties did not dispute it here.
- A verdict that requires a cancer warning therefore adds a labeling requirement to the federal one, and 7 U.S.C. § 136v(b) — the section headed “Uniformity” — preempts it.
The Court leaned on Riegel v. Medtronic, Inc., its 2008 decision reading a nearly identical preemption clause in the Medical Device Amendments. There, the FDA’s premarket approval of a device was itself a federal “requirement,” and it preempted state-law claims premised on a different one. The majority saw no reason to read the pesticide statute differently.
The dissent
Justice Jackson, joined by Justice Gorsuch, read the same clause the other way. In her view a failure-to-warn duty is not additional to FIFRA’s own prohibition on misbranding — it is equivalent to it — and EPA’s decision to register a pesticide and approve its label does not itself create a labeling requirement of the kind the uniformity clause protects. She noted that the Court was departing from the near-unanimous view of the state and federal courts that had rejected this preemption argument before.
What the decision does not do
It does not decide whether glyphosate causes cancer. The majority recites EPA’s repeated conclusion that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer in humans; it does not adopt a scientific finding of its own, and the agency’s own reevaluation of glyphosate is still open. The opinion also notes that states remain free to regulate the sale or use of a federally registered pesticide. And it addresses the failure-to-warn theory that was in front of it — the opinion discusses no other theory of liability.
The question the Court answered was who gets to write the label — not whether the warning would have been true.
What it changes for people with claims
For anyone with a pending failure-to-warn case, the decision is the first thing the other side will file. It arrived while a proposed class settlement was already moving through state court in St. Louis on a schedule of its own, and while the federal cases consolidated as In re Roundup Products Liability Litigation, MDL No. 2741 continued in California. Which of those routes is open to a particular person now depends on facts specific to that person — when they were diagnosed, where they can sue, whether a claim was already filed, and what they did or did not do about the settlement.
None of that is answered by reading an opinion. It is answered by putting a diagnosis date, an exposure history and a filing history side by side, which is work worth doing sooner rather than later, because state filing deadlines run whatever the Supreme Court has said.
This article is general information about how these cases work. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney-client relationship, and no two claims are alike. If something here sounds like your situation, the useful next step is a conversation about the facts.
