logoalt Hacker News

windexh8ertoday at 1:45 AM1 replyview on HN

These aren't labeling cases. Durnell is the one the Supreme Court took, but it's one of tens of thousands. John Durnell sued Monsanto in Missouri state court after getting non-Hodgkin's lymphoma from twenty years of spraying Roundup as the "spray guy" for his neighborhood, and the jury gave him $1.25 million for his cancer, not a fine for a missing sticker. The legal theory is "failure to warn," but that's a tort claim about whether Monsanto adequately communicated the risk to users who then got hurt, not a regulatory question about what text has to appear on the bottle. Earlier California verdicts followed suit. Juries found Monsanto liable for the plaintiffs' cancer under regular product liability law. But, none of these are Prop 65 enforcement actions. [0]

The Jays chips comparison cuts the other way. CA's Prop 65 warning for glyphosate got blocked by a federal court in 2020, the Ninth Circuit upheld the block in 2023, and Prop 65 warnings for acrylamide in food were permanently shut down last May. So... California isn't actually making Roundup carry a Prop 65 warning, which is what your chips comparison assumes. The real question in Durnell is whether federal pesticide law stops a Missouri jury from finding Bayer liable for a specific person's cancer. Pretty different from whether you slap a warning sticker on a bag of chips (and Jay's doesn't carry a "Not for Sale" in CA -that's generally smaller companies who couldn't afford reformulation but the reality is they likely just didn't sell there). [1]

[0] https://legal-planet.org/2026/02/03/pesticides-cancer-and-fa... [1] https://www.greenbergglusker.com/publications/court-finds-re...


Replies

tptacektoday at 3:20 AM

I didn't say they had to pay a fine; I said they lost the strict-liability duty to warn claim, one of three, which requires Monsanto in that state to warn of any potential risks known at the time of manufacture. I think we're all clear it's a tort claim!