Why Kagan and Kavanaugh agreed to end the Roundup bonanza
Bayer’s Monsanto unit stood before a Missouri judge on Monday and asked him to approve a $7.25 billion settlement of roughly 65,000 lawsuits claiming its Roundup weed killer causes cancer. Judge Timothy Boyer heard arguments from both sides in St. Louis and didn’t rule from the bench. But the settlement he’s weighing already looks different from what it did in May. That’s because the Supreme Court spent its June term teaching a lesson most of us learned in eighth-grade civics and then promptly forgot: When federal law and state law collide, federal law wins. It’s called the supremacy clause, and it just did more to reshape Roundup litigation than any jury verdict could.
