(Reuters) — President Donald Trump’s administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to take up Bayer’s bid to curtail thousands of lawsuits claiming its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer, pushing the group’s shares to their highest in almost two years.
In a brief filed at the court, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer bolstered Bayer’s effort to limit the lawsuits and potentially avert billions of dollars in damages, saying the company was correct that the federal law governing pesticides preempts lawsuits that make claims over the products under state law.
“We see the Solicitor General’s recommendation as an important step towards containing glyphosate litigation,” JPMorgan analysts said in a note, adding the Supreme Court was likely to rule next year.
Bayer has asked the justices to hear its appeal of a lower court’s decision to uphold a $1.25 million verdict awarded by a St. Louis jury in a Missouri state court case in which a plaintiff named John Durnell sued after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma he attributed to his exposure to Roundup. Bayer is facing more than 67,000 such lawsuits in U.S. state and federal courts.
The German pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, which acquired Roundup as part of its $63 billion purchase of Monsanto in 2018, has said that decades of studies have shown Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, are safe for human use.
Sauer told the justices that upholding the lower court’s decision would allow juries to second-guess the science-based judgments of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
“EPA has repeatedly determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans, and the agency has repeatedly approved Roundup labels that did not contain cancer warnings,” Sauer said in the brief.
“Where, as here, EPA has specified the health warnings that should appear on a particular pesticide’s label, a manufacturer should not be left subject” to state labeling regimes each prescribing different requirements, Sauer said.
Lawyers for Durnell asked the Supreme Court to turn away Bayer’s appeal. They said the plaintiff relied on Bayer’s advertising and not just the label when he chose to use Roundup, and the company’s marketing failed to warn consumers of the product’s risks.
The U.S. Supreme Court asked the Trump administration in June for its views in the case.