The case involved the claim that Roundup, the widely used weedkiller, caused a Missouri man's cancer -- so the company that makes it owed him (and his lawyers!) $1.25 million because it never put a warning to that effect on the label. Getty Images See more of our coverage in your search results.
Add The New York Post on Google Yay: The Supreme Court just embraced science and sense over hysteria and trial-lawyer greed, slapping down an entire class of lawsuits that aimed to suck hundreds of billions of dollars out of US businesses just because (as bank robber Willie Sutton once put it) “that’s where the money is.”
In the case at hand, the junk-science claim was that Roundup, the widely used weedkiller, caused a Missouri man’s cancer — so the company that makes it owed him (and his lawyers!) $1.25 million because it never put a warning to that effect on the label.
The problem is, the federal Environmental Protection Agency has repeatedly tested that claim about glyphosate (the herbicide’s key ingredient) and found no such effect, and so refuses to require a warning.
By 7-2, the justices ruled that state courts can’t create their own standards for such warnings when the feds have already acted.
FIFRA (the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act) established a single national labeling system specifically to avoid a proliferation of state requirements.
This ruling nixes thousands of similar suits against Bayer (which bought Roundup’s maker, Monsanto, in 2019), and countless more efforts to sue other companies with similar theories.
Since judgments in Roundup cases have hit the billions, the lawsuits were never going to stop until the Supremes shut the racket down.
And not just Roundup cases: The ambulance-chasing bar spends big to fund studies that declare all manner of substances to possibly be cancer-causing, claims that paid “experts” can cite to give juries an excuse to help out a sympathetic plaintiff.
The high court just dealt a huge blow to that scam, a win for companies that make things and a loss for racketeering lawyers.
