State and federal courts jockey for power in the Roundup case and other mass public harms

Clear Statements is a recurring series by Abbe R. Gluck on civil litigation and the modern regulatory and statutory state. The Supreme Court on Monday heard argument in Monsanto Co. v Durnell, a complex dispute over whether a federal law governing pesticide labeling and registration prevented a Missouri jury from awarding $1.25 million to a volunteer gardener who alleged that Monsanto had failed to warn that its popular weed killer Roundup causes cancer. The preemption arguments – which centered around whether state law could add a warning requirement when the federal agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, has not required any warning – are intricate and have been widely covered elsewhere, except for one aspect involving administrative deference that I will return to at the end of this column. But first, it’s worth zooming out to understand the case’s importance for the bigger picture – not only for the billions of dollars at stake in the more than 60,000 Roundup cases proceeding across the nation, but also for how the case implicates important, and complicated, questions about class actions and other forms of mass litigation. First, the Missouri jury trial involved just one plaintiff, but there are thousands of other lawsuits