Monsanto Wins at the Supreme Court Using Big Tobacco’s Playbook

In the late 1990s, John Durnell began using the weedkiller Roundup to help tend to the community spaces in his neighborhood in St. Louis. Since then, he and roughly 170,000 other users have been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and related cancers associated with extended exposure to glyphosate, Roundup’s key ingredient and a probable carcinogen. Many of them have filed suit against Monsanto, now owned by Bayer. But out of those 60,000 still-active lawsuits, only Durnell’s case reached the Supreme Court. Now, it has become something much larger than one man’s lawsuit: a decision that federal regulatory approval can permanently shield corporations against accountability for harm, regardless of what their own internal documents and science later reveal.

In Monsanto v. Durnell, the question before the court was whether the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts state failure-to-warn lawsuits when the Environmental Protection Agency has not required the warning. Monsanto argued preemption on two grounds. First, as the EPA did not require a cancer warning at the time of product registration, a state tort claim seeking damages for a lack of such warning should be considered as an additional burden beyond FIFRA’s labeling standard, necessitating express preemption. Second, as a manufacturer cannot change EPA-approved labeling unilaterally, complying with both state and federal law would be impossible, preempting state suits. Durnell argued that FIFRA explicitly allows state authority over pesticide use, and given current scientific knowledge, this state tort claim is consistent with FIFRA’s labeling standard. On Thursday, the Supreme Court handed down a 7–2 decision broadly in favor of Monsanto, ruling that FIFRA expressly preempts Durnell’s state failure-to-warn claim because it would require Monsanto to include a cancer warning “in addition to” what the EPA actually required. The decision closes the door on tens of thousands of state-based failure-to-warn cases, but Monsanto continues to face liability litigation in non-failure-to-warn-based cases.

To those paying attention, Monsanto is the latest in a series of attempts by industry to use federal authority as a shield against state accountability. Five cases this term dealt with this issue, with the court consistently narrowing liability.

Together, these cases established a consistent rule: Federal authority shields private actors from state accountability only when federal involvement is real, specific, and congressionally authorized. Not when it’s merely implied, regulatory, or commercial. This logic mostly undermines the framework that the liability shield was built on.

The modern shield strategy was first presented to the Supreme Court in 1992, in Cipollone v. Liggett Group LLC, where the court agreed in part with the tobacco industry that the congressionally mandated surgeon general’s warning about cigarettes already superseded any state-based failure-to-warn claim. However, they also agreed with Cipollone that tobacco liability cases do not get blanket federal preemption, especially if industry participates in fraud or other deceptive practices independent of a warning label. While not perfect, this case set the blueprint for all corporations: lobby for lenient federal regulation and then invoke the supremacy clause to throw out state accountability. This is the same argument Monsanto made about Roundup under FIFRA, the same argument made by fossil-fuel companies about federal climate regulation, and the same argument dozens of corporations make about industry-specific federal legislation. It all traces back to an over-30-year-old legal brief from Big Tobacco: They created the modern liability shield playbook and invented the legal interpretation that its successors are now trying to complete.

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However, this playbook depends on that specific federal regulatory system staying in place—a system that the conservative legal movement has also spent the last 30 years dismantling. The rollback began with U.S. v. Lopez, where the court limited congressional authority under the commerce clause. The 2005 Bates v. Dow Agrosciences case showed the court carving a limitation in the rollback for FIFRA, the same statute at play in Monsanto. They determined that FIFRA only allows federal preemption if the state law labeling requirements were “in addition to or different from” FIFRA’s labeling standards. From there, the rollback returned to full speed, actualizing in some of the most consequential SCOTUS decisions in recent history: Dobbs, the removal of federal constraints on state authority over abortion and returning the question to the state, and Loper Bright, the overturning of Chevron deference, limiting federal agency authority. With the results prior to Monsanto, it seemed like the movement that was supposed to free private enterprise from regulatory overreach was also weakening the shield that regulatory power provided.

But with this decision, Monsanto manages to bridge a structural incompatibility the shield strategy could not previously resolve: The same court that spent decades limiting federal agency power was asked to treat federal regulatory approval as supreme over state accountability. A result even Bayer-Monsanto seemed to doubt was possible after oral arguments, as evidenced by the intensification of their fight on every other available front.

Their campaign has already produced results. A 2026 executive order invokes the Defense Production Act to protect and encourage the production of glyphosate as a national security necessity, granting producers immunity through federal designation rather than judicial preemption. In Congress, a broad pesticides preemption provision that would have effectively legislated the outcome the judiciary kept failing to grant was stripped from the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026 before its House vote. Both of these actions run parallel to an additional proposed $7.25 billion class-action settlement intended to contain the remaining litigants suffering from what one appellate court called the carcinogenic dangers of a product Monsanto made abundantly available at hardware stores and garden shops across the country.

The pattern extends well beyond Roundup. Sen. Ted Cruz and Rep. Harriet Hageman have introduced companion Stop Climate Shakedowns bills intended to shield fossil-fuel companies from climate liability. Different industry, same playbook. Two days after Monsanto’s FIFRA preemption argument, the court heard Hikma Pharmaceuticals’ argument that Food and Drug Administration regulatory approval shields generic drug manufacturers from patent liability. Across pesticide and chemical litigation, climate lawsuits, and pharmaceutical patent disputes, the same underlying logic emerges: federal regulatory compliance deployed as a universal liability shield, usually encountering the same judicial resistance.

With the delivery of the Monsanto decision, all eyes now turn to next term’s Suncor v. Boulder County Commissioners. But this case is asking for more than whether a company should have warned people about the deadly side effects of one herbicide; it’s asking whether the entire federal framework governing greenhouse gas emissions forecloses state accountability for the fossil-fuel industry’s decades of documented concealment. While Monsanto closes the door on label-based pesticide liability, if the court remains consistent with what it had established this term prior to Monsanto, the liability exposure could be existential for the fossil fuel industry. If immunity via other arenas arrives first, through shield laws at the state and federal levels or through executive designation, the court may never have to answer. At this point, industry will not stop seeking a federal shield against state accountability. But Boulder could determine whether accountability arrives first.

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