St. Louis, Missouri Roundup Lawsuit: What the Supreme Court’s 7-2 Preemption Ruling Means for Your Cancer Claim
If you are reading this, you or someone you love probably used Roundup for years — on a farm, on a landscaping crew, in a garden, on a grounds crew — and then a doctor said the words non-Hodgkin lymphoma. You may have already heard about the Supreme Court’s ruling in June 2026 and the headline that Bayer “won.” The first thing we want you to know is this: the ruling blocked one legal theory, not your entire case. The failure-to-warn claim — the argument that Monsanto should have put a cancer warning on the label — is now federally preempted. But negligence, design defect, and fraudulent-marketing claims are still alive, and the deadline to file them is running in every state, including Missouri.
We are Attorney911 — The Manginello Law Firm. We take product-liability and toxic-tort cases out of Missouri and nationwide. Ralph Manginello has spent 27-plus years in courtrooms, including federal court, building cases against companies that knew their products were dangerous and said nothing. Lupe Peña spent years inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where corporate claims teams decide how to value, delay, and devalue people exactly like you — before he came to this side of the table. He conducts full consultations in Spanish without an interpreter. We work on contingency: 33.33% before trial, 40% if the case goes to trial. We do not get paid unless we win your case. The call is free. The number is 1-888-ATTY-911.
This page is the complete analysis of where the Roundup litigation stands after the Supreme Court’s ruling, what claims survive, what the medicine of non-Hodgkin lymphoma actually looks like, what the evidence clock is, and what you should do — and not do — right now.
What Claims Survive After the Preemption Ruling
What legal theories are still viable for a Roundup cancer lawsuit? Three major theories survive the Supreme Court’s preemption ruling — though Bayer is fighting to extend the preemption reasoning to each of them.
Negligence: The Knowledge Claim
The negligence theory does not depend on what the label said. It depends on what Monsanto knew — or should have known — about glyphosate’s carcinogenic risks, and whether the company exercised reasonable care in designing, testing, marketing, and selling the product. This is a fundamentally different claim from “the label should have had a warning.” It asks whether the company’s entire conduct — the testing it did or did not do, the science it pursued or suppressed, the way it marketed the product to farmers and gardeners — met the standard of reasonable care.
The negligence theory is powerful because it reaches conduct that has nothing to do with the label. If Monsanto’s own scientists raised concerns internally and the company pressed forward anyway, that is negligence evidence that preemption does not touch. If the company influenced regulatory assessments or ghostwrote scientific literature to shape the public understanding of glyphosate’s safety, that is negligence evidence independent of labeling.
Bayer will argue that the preemption logic should extend to negligence claims because the EPA’s safety determination covers the product as a whole, not just the label. That argument has not been accepted by the Supreme Court, and courts in different jurisdictions may split on how far the preemption rationale reaches. This is one of the most active battlegrounds in the litigation right now.
Design Defect: The Product Itself Is Unreasonably Dangerous
The design-defect theory says that Roundup is unreasonably dangerous by design — that glyphosate’s carcinogenic risks could have been reduced or eliminated through alternative formulations, lower concentrations, or different surfactant combinations. This theory is distinct from the labeling claim because it challenges the product’s formulation itself, not the warning on the container.
A design-defect claim asks whether a safer alternative existed and whether the company chose not to use it. For Roundup, that could mean: Was there a formulation that achieved the weed-killing purpose with less carcinogenic risk? Did Monsanto study alternative formulations? Did it choose the glyphosate-based formula because it was the most profitable, not the safest? These are questions a jury can answer without ever looking at the label.
The preemption argument is weaker here. The EPA approved the label; it did not immunize the product design from all state-law scrutiny. But Bayer will push hard to extend the reasoning, and some courts may agree.
Fraudulent Marketing and Misrepresentation
This theory targets Monsanto’s conduct beyond labeling — marketing campaigns that portrayed Roundup as safe, including allegations that the company ghostwrote scientific literature, influenced regulatory assessments, and promoted the product in ways that misled consumers about its safety.
If Monsanto told the public — through advertising, through sponsored research, through industry outreach — that Roundup was safe, and if the company knew or had reason to know that statement was false or misleading, that is a fraud claim that does not depend on the EPA-approved label. The label is one piece of paper. The marketing campaign is a strategy.
This theory may carry the most potential for punitive damages. If a jury finds that Monsanto not only failed to warn but actively misled the public about the safety of its product — that it shaped the science, shaped the regulatory record, and shaped public perception — the aggravating conduct that drives punitive awards is alive and well, even after the preemption ruling on failure-to-warn.
The Medicine: Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and What It Does to a Family
Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer of the lymphatic system — specifically of lymphocytes, the white blood cells that fight infection. It is not one disease but a group of more than 70 subtypes, ranging from indolent (slow-growing) forms that may smolder for years to aggressive forms that require immediate treatment.
The most common subtype is diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, an aggressive form that typically requires immediate chemotherapy. The standard frontline regimen — R-CHOP — combines three chemotherapy drugs, a steroid, and a monoclonal antibody (rituximab) that targets a specific protein on the surface of lymphoma cells. Treatment cycles run every two to three weeks for six cycles, each followed by a recovery period. For many patients, the treatment also includes radiation therapy to involved sites.
For patients whose lymphoma relapses or does not respond to frontline therapy, the treatment escalates: high-dose chemotherapy followed by stem cell transplantation (either autologous, using the patient’s own stem cells, or allogeneic, using a donor’s). Stem cell transplants are among the most grueling procedures in medicine — weeks in the hospital, a deliberately destroyed immune system, and a long recovery period during which the patient is vulnerable to infections that a healthy body would shrug off. CAR-T cell therapy, a newer immunotherapy in which the patient’s own T cells are genetically engineered to attack the lymphoma, has shown remarkable results for certain subtypes but carries its own risks, including cytokine release syndrome and neurological toxicity.
Here is what the family watches: the person they knew — the farmer who worked dawn to dusk, the landscaper who built beauty from dirt, the gardener who grew tomatoes for the neighborhood — becomes someone who cannot get through a conversation without falling asleep. The chemotherapy brain fog is real; the nausea is real; the fear is real. A stem cell transplant means isolation for weeks. The medical bills arrive in stacks. The paychecks stop. The retirement plan shrinks. And underneath all of it, there is a question the family cannot stop asking: did the weedkiller cause this?
The defense will say: non-Hodgkin lymphoma is common. It has many causes. It cannot be traced to one chemical exposure. The plaintiff’s experts must bridge that gap — proving that the specific exposure history (years of regular Roundup use, the frequency, the duration, the lack of protective equipment) is more likely than not the cause of this specific cancer. That is general causation (does glyphosate cause NHL?) and specific causation (did glyphosate cause THIS person’s NHL?). Both must be proven, and both are contested.
For families who have lost someone to NHL, the wrongful-death track carries its own damages — the financial support the person would have provided, the companionship lost, the suffering the person endured between diagnosis and death. Missouri’s wrongful-death statute gives a shorter deadline for these claims, and that clock may already be running.
Missouri Law and Your Rights After the Ruling
What does Missouri law say about your Roundup case? Missouri’s product-liability framework has historically been one of the more plaintiff-favorable in the country, and the Supreme Court’s preemption ruling — while a significant setback — does not erase every Missouri-law advantage.
Missouri follows pure comparative fault. That means even if you are found partly at fault — for example, because you did not always wear protective gear when spraying Roundup — your recovery is reduced by your percentage of fault, never automatically erased. In a state with a 50% bar or a 51% bar, a plaintiff who is found more than half at fault loses everything. In Missouri, you recover your damages minus your share. Every percentage point the defense tries to pin on you is money, and every point is worth fighting.
Missouri does not impose statutory damage caps in product-liability actions. This is a critical distinction. Missouri does cap non-economic damages in medical-malpractice cases, but product-liability claims are not subject to those caps. That means a jury in a Roundup case can award the full measure of pain and suffering, emotional distress, and loss of quality of life without a statutory ceiling cutting the number down. In a non-Hodgkin lymphoma case — where the suffering is profound and the treatment is brutal — the absence of caps is a significant advantage.
The City of St. Louis and St. Louis County circuit courts have been attractive venues for product-liability plaintiffs. Missouri’s trial bar is robust, the jury pools in St. Louis have shown a willingness to hold corporate defendants accountable, and the jurisdictional rules have historically allowed aggregation of cases from outside Missouri. The Supreme Court’s preemption ruling does not change the venue — it changes the claims that can be brought there.
The Statute of Limitations Clock
Missouri’s general personal-injury statute of limitations gives you five years to file a lawsuit from the date the cause of action accrues. For a latent disease like non-Hodgkin lymphoma, the discovery rule may apply — meaning the clock may not start running on the date you were exposed to Roundup, but on the date you discovered (or, exercising reasonable diligence, should have discovered) that your injury was caused by the exposure. For many plaintiffs, that accrual date is the date of the NHL diagnosis, or the date they first learned of a possible connection between Roundup and cancer.
If your loved one has died from NHL or related complications, Missouri’s wrongful-death statute provides a shorter deadline — three years from the date of death. That is a separate, faster clock, and if your family member has passed, you should not wait to understand your rights.
There is also a potential statute-of-repose issue that could impose an outer deadline measured from the date the product was sold, regardless of when the injury was discovered. Whether a repose period applies to your case, and how it interacts with the discovery rule, is a question that depends on the specific facts and the current state of Missouri law. The honest answer is: the deadline may be shorter than you think, and the only way to know for certain is to have an attorney in Missouri evaluate your specific timeline.
The Supreme Court’s preemption ruling does not extend the statute of limitations. The clock is still running. Bayer’s proposed $7.25 billion settlement framework may set deadlines for opt-in or opt-out decisions that are shorter than the statutory SOL. And as Bayer leverages the SCOTUS ruling to reduce per-claim settlement offers, the window for obtaining full value may be narrowing.
What Your Case May Be Worth
How much is a Roundup cancer lawsuit worth? No honest attorney can tell you a specific dollar figure without reviewing your medical records, your exposure history, and the specific legal theories that survive in your jurisdiction. What we can tell you is the framework that drives valuation — and how the Supreme Court ruling has changed it.
The Settlement Landscape
Bayer has paid approximately $11 billion to settle roughly 100,000 cases. That works out to an average of roughly $110,000 per case, though individual values varied widely based on exposure duration, injury severity, age at diagnosis, and other factors.
Bayer has proposed a $7.25 billion aggregate settlement to resolve remaining and future claims — approximately 61,000 to 65,000 active claims. That works out to an average of roughly $110,000 to $120,000 per case. But the SCOTUS ruling has changed the leverage behind those numbers. Before the ruling, the threat of large trial verdicts on failure-to-warn claims pushed Bayer to settle at higher values. With the primary trial theory preempted, the pressure to settle has decreased, and the per-claim offers in the proposed framework may reflect that reduced leverage.
Case Value Ranges
At the low end — minimal-exposure cases under post-SCOTUS settlement pressure where only weakened negligence theories survive — values may fall in the $25,000 range. At the mid-range — typical NHL cases with documented occupational exposure and moderate treatment histories — values reflect the severity of the cancer and the strength of the causation evidence. At the high end — strong-exposure cases with compelling design-defect or marketing-fraud evidence that may still proceed to trial, particularly where punitive-damage evidence of corporate misconduct survives preemption challenges — values can reach into the millions.
Pre-ruling trial verdicts reached significantly higher amounts, but the SCOTUS ruling has materially reduced plaintiff leverage and likely lowered both settlement floors and trial ceilings. The $1.25 million verdict the St. Louis gardener won — the very verdict the Supreme Court reversed — is an example of what a pre-ruling failure-to-warn verdict looked like. Post-ruling, the path to a comparable number runs through negligence, design defect, or fraud theories, not failure-to-warn.
What Drives the Value of Your Specific Case
Several factors determine where your case falls in the range. The duration and intensity of your Roundup exposure — a farmer who sprayed thousands of gallons over twenty years has a stronger exposure profile than a homeowner who used a consumer-size sprayer a few times a year. Your age at diagnosis and your overall health before the cancer. The specific NHL subtype and its prognosis. Whether you underwent chemotherapy only, or required radiation, stem cell transplantation, or CAR-T therapy. Whether you were able to continue working during treatment or lost significant income. Whether your case includes a wrongful-death component for a family member who has passed.
A real case value is built by a life-care planner who prices out every future medical need — the ongoing monitoring scans, the medications, the potential relapse treatment — and a forensic economist who reduces that cost stream to present value. The adjuster’s first offer is a fraction of that number. Knowing the real value is what separates a case that settles for what it is worth from one that settles for what the company wants to pay.
How a Case Is Actually Built: The Proof Story
Here is how a Roundup cancer case is built, from the first call to resolution.
Week one: The preservation letter goes out to Bayer, freezing internal Monsanto documents, corporate communications, scientific studies, regulatory correspondence, and marketing materials. Medical records are requested from every treating provider — the oncologist, the radiation center, the hospital where the biopsy was done, the infusion center where the chemotherapy was administered. Exposure history is documented: when did you first use Roundup, how often, for how many years, in what quantities, with what protective equipment (if any), in what occupational context. Witnesses are identified — co-workers who can describe your exposure, family members who can describe your health before and after, supervisors who can confirm your duties.
Weeks two through eight: The complete medical record is assembled and reviewed. The exposure timeline is built. Expert witnesses are identified and retained — a board-certified oncologist to address specific causation, a toxicologist to address the mechanism of glyphosate carcinogenicity, an epidemiologist to address the population-level evidence. A life-care planner begins building the future-cost stream — the ongoing monitoring, the potential relapse treatment, the medications, the medical equipment. A forensic economist begins reducing that stream to present value. The case is evaluated against the surviving legal theories — negligence, design defect, marketing fraud — and the strongest theory for this specific fact pattern is identified.
Filing and discovery: The case is filed within the statute of limitations. Written discovery — interrogatories, document requests, requests for admission — is served on Bayer. Internal Monsanto documents are produced: the testing records, the scientific studies, the marketing strategy memos, the regulatory correspondence, the internal communications about glyphosate’s carcinogenic potential. Depositions are taken — of the corporate representatives who can explain the design and testing decisions, of the defense experts who will challenge causation, of the treating physicians who can describe the patient’s cancer and its course.
Mediation and trial: The case is positioned for resolution — through the settlement framework, through mediation, or through trial. The SCOTUS ruling has changed the leverage, but it has not eliminated the path. A case with strong exposure evidence, a clear NHL diagnosis, compelling negligence or fraud evidence, and a well-built life-care plan still has value. The question is whether the settlement framework offers fair value or whether the case should proceed to trial on surviving theories.
Why This Firm
Toxic tort cases — cases where a corporation’s product caused a disease that took years to surface — are among the most complex in the law. They require medical understanding, scientific literacy, corporate-document discovery, expert-witness management, and a willingness to fight a defendant with effectively unlimited resources. Bayer AG is one of the largest pharmaceutical and chemical companies on earth. It has armies of lawyers. It has billions at stake. It just won a Supreme Court ruling that changed the landscape. You need a firm that understands what the ruling means, what it does not mean, and how to build the surviving theories into a case worth real money.
Ralph Manginello has been licensed in Texas since November 6, 1998 — 27-plus years of trial practice, including admission to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. He was a journalist before he was a lawyer, which means he knows how to find the story the documents tell. He has spent his career building cases against defendants who counted on the injured person not having the resources or the knowledge to fight back. He takes Missouri cases with local counsel where required, and he has never treated a mass-tort plaintiff as a file number.
Lupe Peña was licensed in Texas in December 2012. Before he joined this firm, he worked inside a national insurance-defense firm — the rooms where corporate claims teams and their software decide how to value, delay, and devalue injured people. He knows how the other side calculates a settlement offer. He knows the reserve-setting process, the IME-doctor selection, the surveillance tactics, the delay strategies. He now uses that knowledge for injured clients. He is fluent in Spanish and conducts full consultations without an interpreter — because a family that prays in Spanish deserves a lawyer who speaks it.
Our firm has recovered $50 million-plus for clients over 24-plus years in practice. Those results include a $5 million-plus brain-injury settlement, a $3.8 million-plus amputation settlement, and a $2.5 million-plus truck-crash recovery. Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. But the record tells you what we are built to do: we take catastrophic-injury and wrongful-death cases, we build them with expert precision, and we do not back down because the defendant is large.
If your loved one has died from non-Hodgkin lymphoma after years of Roundup exposure, the wrongful-death path carries its own damages and its own shorter deadline. Missouri’s wrongful-death clock is three years from the date of death. If that clock applies to your family, it may already be running.
The Bottom Line
The Supreme Court’s ruling is a setback — not a surrender. The failure-to-warn theory is preempted. The negligence, design-defect, and marketing-fraud theories are not — at least not yet, and not without a fight. Bayer is counting on the headline — “Supreme Court sides with Bayer” — to make plaintiffs give up, accept low settlements, or never call a lawyer at all. That is the strategy. The headline is the weapon.
The people who used Roundup for years and developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma are not headlines. They are farmers, landscapers, gardeners, and groundskeepers who trusted a product and got cancer. The St. Louis gardener whose case reached the Supreme Court — a man who won $1.25 million from a Missouri jury that believed Roundup caused his cancer — had his verdict reversed. Two Supreme Court justices said that left him without a remedy. The question now is whether the remaining legal theories can give him — and you — one.
The deadline is running. The evidence is degrading. The settlement framework is evolving. The call is free. 1-888-ATTY-911. We do not get paid unless we win your case.
Past results depend on the facts of each case and do not guarantee future outcomes. This page is legal information, not legal advice. Contacting the firm is free and confidential. Hablamos Español.