Bayer's $7.25 Billion Roundup Settlement Gets New Court Date

A court in Missouri has set a new hearing date for one of the biggest legal settlements in recent memory. A judge will review Bayer's proposed $7.25 billion deal on August 19. The deal is meant to settle thousands of lawsuits claiming that Bayer's weedkiller, Roundup, causes cancer. The hearing was originally planned for early July but was pushed back by about six weeks.

Bayer is a large German company that makes medicines and farm chemicals. It bought a company called Monsanto in 2018, and Roundup came with that purchase. Around 65,000 people in the United States have filed claims saying they developed a type of cancer called non-Hodgkin lymphoma after using Roundup at home or at work. Bayer says that decades of scientific studies have shown that Roundup's main ingredient, a chemical called glyphosate, is safe and does not cause cancer.

The settlement was first announced in February. It is designed to resolve most of the current lawsuits and also cover people who have already been exposed to Roundup and might get cancer in the future. However, dozens of people have objected to the deal. They argue that it is not fair to cancer victims and to people who may get sick later on.

Just before the new hearing date was set, the U.S. Supreme Court handed Bayer an important legal win. The Supreme Court ruled that thousands of claims — ones saying Roundup's warning label did not properly tell people about the cancer risk — were blocked under federal law. This type of claim is called a 'failure-to-warn' claim. These claims were part of most Roundup lawsuits and are generally seen as easier for victims to prove than other legal arguments.

The Supreme Court's ruling did not change the terms of Bayer's settlement offer. Bayer said it is still committed to moving forward with the deal. Bayer's Monsanto unit also said the ruling makes the company's position much stronger when dealing with people who chose not to join the settlement. Plaintiffs' lawyers, who represent the people suing, said they still believe they can win cases using other legal arguments that the Supreme Court did not address.

The Supreme Court's ruling even stopped one trial in its tracks. A judge in a different Missouri court declared a mistrial on Friday because the case included arguments tied to failure-to-warn claims, which the Supreme Court had now ruled were not allowed. The Supreme Court also sent several other Roundup cases back to lower courts to take another look, including cases about whether Roundup was poorly designed.

The proposed settlement does not cover about 4,000 Roundup cases that are grouped together in federal court. The judge handling those cases has been critical of the settlement in the past. That judge scheduled a meeting for July 7 to talk about how the Supreme Court's ruling affects those pending cases. The six-week delay in the state court process, according to Monsanto, will not seriously slow down the overall settlement approval.