In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate – the active ingredient in Roundup – as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” This finding became a catalyst for litigation. The IARC report initiated an avalanche of lawsuits American Council on Science and Health, even as the U.S. EPA and other regulators maintained that glyphosate was safe.
Federal lawsuits were consolidated into multidistrict litigation (MDL) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. As of early 2026, the Roundup MDL in the Northern District of California had about 4,511 pending cases out of 5,240 total.
On Tuesday, Bayer and attorneys for cancer patients announced a proposed $7.25 billion settlement to resolve thousands of U.S. lawsuits alleging the company failed to warn people that Roundup could cause cancer. The settlement was filed in St. Louis Circuit Court in Missouri. It is not clear at this time what effect this development will have on cases pending across the nation, and particularly cases pending here in California.
All three of the first Roundup trials took place in California, and all three resulted in massive plaintiff verdicts.
– – Johnson v. Monsanto (2018) — San Francisco Superior Court The first ever Roundup cancer lawsuit to proceed to trial was for Dewayne “Lee” Johnson, a groundskeeper for the Benicia Unified School District in the San Francisco Bay Area. Wisner Baum Johnson, 46, applied Roundup weedkiller 20 to 30 times per year while working as a groundskeeper for a school district near San Francisco. He testified that during his work, he had two accidents in which he was soaked with the product. He was diagnosed with terminal non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2014. His case went first because in California, dying plaintiffs can be granted expedited trials. On August 10, 2018, a San Francisco jury ordered Monsanto to pay $39.25 million in compensatory damages and $250 million in punitive damages – a total of $289 million. The trial judge later reduced the total to $78.5 million, and an appellate court slashed it a second time. Johnson finally got paid late in 2020: $20.5 million, a fraction of the initial jury award.
– – Hardeman v. Monsanto (2019) — U.S. District Court, Northern District of California Edwin Hardeman, 70, and his wife spent decades living in Sonoma County, California, on 56 acres of land. He started using Monsanto herbicides to treat poison oak, overgrowth, and weeds on his property in 1986 and continued using Roundup through 2012. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in February 2015. This case served as a federal “bellwether” trial – a test case for the thousands of cases in the MDL. In 2019, a six-person jury awarded Hardeman $75 million in punitive damages and $5 million in compensatory damages. The judge later reduced the total to $25 million. In May 2021, the Ninth Circuit affirmed the jury’s finding that Roundup caused Hardeman’s cancer – the first federal appellate decision in the country on this issue. In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Bayer’s appeal of the Hardeman verdict.
– – Pilliod v. Monsanto (2019) — Alameda County Superior Court Alva and Alberta Pilliod, a Bay Area couple, began using Roundup on their properties in 1982. Alva was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma in 2011, and Alberta was diagnosed in 2015. On May 13, 2019, jurors returned a verdict awarding the Pilliods $2 billion in punitive damages and $55 million in compensatory damages – the largest Roundup verdict at that time. The judge later reduced their award to $87 million. Monsanto appealed, but the California Court of Appeal denied the appeal in August 2021, and the California Supreme Court denied review in November 2021. The U.S. Supreme Court also declined to take up the case in June 2022.
It wasn’t all losses for Bayer. In October 2021, a jury in the Superior Court of California for the County of Los Angeles ruled in Bayer’s favor in the Clark trial, finding that Roundup did not cause the plaintiff’s child’s illness. In December 2021, a jury in San Bernardino County ruled in Bayer’s favor in the Stephens trial.
Meanwhile, the Ninth Circuit’s rejection of Bayer’s federal preemption argument in Hardeman was a critical setback. In May 2021, the Ninth Circuit held that EPA’s approval of a pesticide label does not immunize a manufacturer from liability in the tort system. However, Bayer continued to push the preemption argument, and the U.S. Supreme Court has now agreed to hear a different case (Durnell) on this question, with oral arguments scheduled for late April 2026.
Although there are still over 4,500 cases pending in the California MDL, there is not a lot of focus on it at this point. Most new lawsuits are being filed in Pennsylvania, Missouri, or California, The litigation’s center of gravity has shifted toward the state courts, the Supreme Court preemption case, and now the proposed $7.25 billion settlement filed in Missouri.