New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez on Wednesday led a multi-state coalition asking U.S. Supreme Court justices to preserve several states’ abilities to seek restitution from pesticide manufacturers.
The New Mexico Department of Justice and attorneys general for 16 other states and Washington, D.C., filed a brief of support in the Missouri case Monsanto Co. v. Durnell. The case focuses on a dispute over whether the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act protects manufacturers like Monsanto from local lawsuits that accuse its products of causing cancer.
Torrez and the other AGs argue that members of Congress did not intend to do away with various state law protections when they signed the federal legislation nearly 80 years ago.
A Missouri gardener named John Durnell filed the suit against Monsanto in 2019 after receiving a non-Hodgkins lymphoma diagnosis. He alleged that Monsanto did not adequately disclose cancer risks associated with using the weed killer Roundup.
Monsanto’s parent company, Bayer, has long countered that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency does not list Roundup’s active ingredient as a known carcinogen and that it stands to reason that federal policies would take precedence over any state’s requirement to disclose cancer risks. Bayer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The AGs in Wednesday’s filing disagree.
“At stake in this case is whether state law will continue enabling people to hold pesticide manufacturers accountable in many cases,” Torrez said in a statement. “We are leading this coalition to ensure that federal law is not misused to shield corporations from accountability and to defend the ability of states to safeguard public health through private claims brought in state courts.”
A Missouri court ruled in Durnell’s favor and awarded him $1.25 million. Torrez and the other state AGs on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to uphold that decision.
However, the U.S. Court of Appeals in a separate Pennsylvania case against Monsanto ruled that federal law overrode the state’s labeling requirements.
In petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court, Monsanto has argued that these two cases represent a “deepening split” that sorely needs clarity.
The company’s lawyers have also argued that varying labeling requirements across states would create a “crazy-quilt” of standards, Torrez wrote in the Supreme Court filing. He alleged that the characterization is “exaggerated,” though, and that obligations to warn of potential harms associated with a consumer product are “more or less the same across states.”
“Inconvenience to Monsanto is no reason to pre-empt state law where federal law allows considerable latitude,” Torrez wrote.
Oral arguments are scheduled for April 27.
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