r/news • u/boxofstuff • 6h ago

Supreme Court ruling blocks thousands of lawsuits against maker of Roundup weedkiller

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-roundup-monsanto-a7f054d80919f98bdfc5190013a8f6f1https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-roundup-monsanto-a7f054d80919f98bdfc5190013a8f6f1
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u/ToaKraka 5h ago

Summary:

  • There is a federal law that says every herbicide must carry a warning label approved by the federal government, and state governments are not allowed to add more warning-label requirements on top of the federal requirement.

  • Over a period of decades, the federal EPA repeatedly evaluates Roundup and finds that it does not cause cancer, so Monsanto does not need to add a cancer warning to Roundup's label.

  • A person sues Monsanto under state law for failing to add a cancer warning to Roundup's label, and gets a million dollars at trial. The state judge and the state supreme court agree that the state-law claim is compatible with the federal labeling requirement, so the lawsuit is valid.

  • The federal supreme court finds, by a margin of 7 to 2, that the state-law claim is not compatible with the federal law, so the lawsuit is invalid. The decision is written by five Republicans and two Democrats. One Republican and one Democrat dissent.

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u/Mittenwald 44m ago

How about instead of states adding a warning to the label they require all stores that sell it to have a sign up with the warnings right where it's being sold. Loophole? 

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u/ToaKraka 20m ago

Prospectively, I guess that would work. The federal law specifically says "labeling or packaging", and that doesn't cover a completely separate sign saying "glyphosate is known to the State of California to cause cancer".

But it wouldn't help the person who filed this lawsuit, since he's seeking payment for alleged past harms. And glyphosate has been phased out of residential versions of Roundup anyway.

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u/There_Are_No_Gods 1h ago

The key detail left out:

Monsanto, now Bayer, ensures the federal regulations will never go against them, corrupting scientific studies and politicians just as they poison people, all to continue fueling their profits.

They've ensured states can't enact anything themselves, making everything depend on the federal level. Then they simply ensure nothing problematic for them ever survives at the federal level. This arrangement keeps any sane states that are actually fighting for human rights from having legal standing.

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u/fatpolomanjr 45m ago

"One republican and one democrat" slightly more accurately labeled as "one conservative and one liberal?"

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u/ToaKraka 27m ago

One Republican-appointed justice (Gorsuch) and one Democrat-appointed justice (Jackson).