Perennial Judicial Hellhole® Among Those States Looking to Improve Civil Justice Climate
State legislatures across the country hit the ground running in 2025 as several states look to improve their civil justice climates and eradicate lawsuit abuse. Missouri, a perennial Judicial Hellhole®, is one of those states as legislators look to take significant steps towards removing the state from the Judicial Hellholes® list once and for all.
The legislature’s priority issues include shortening the statute of limitations for personal injury cases, ensuring that only a company that manufactures a product is the one held liable in the event of harm, eliminating phantom damages, and bringing the state’s standard for expert evidence in line with the newly amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure.
Junk science has been front and center in St. Louis courts for the past several years. St. Louis judges have refused to serve as gatekeepers to prevent juries from hearing dubious scientific evidence put forth by plaintiffs’ lawyers as the foundation for their claims. They have disregarded the guidance and expertise of federal agencies and regulators who are charged with protecting public health and prioritized the financial interests of plaintiffs’ lawyers, another issue that several state legislatures including Missouri, Montana, Iowa, Tennessee, and Florida are looking to address.
Nowhere has this been more pronounced than in the baseless litigation targeting Roundup® over its active ingredient, glyphosate. Plaintiffs’ lawyers across the country, including in Judicial Hellholes® Philadelphia, California, and St. Louis, claim glyphosate causes non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. They make this claim despite over 800 scientific studies refuting it. Environmental safety agencies in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the European Union have spent decades reviewing the health impacts of glyphosate. All agree that no credible evidence exists linking glyphosate to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. But there is one outlier organization that says otherwise, and it is heavily relied upon by plaintiffs’ lawyers. An advisory group of the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) deemed glyphosate a “probable human carcinogen.” Testimony in 2017 by a senior scientist on that IARC panel revealed critical evidence favorable to glyphosate had been withheld and would likely have changed IARC’s conclusion. The panel was run by Christopher Portier, a scientist who received $160,000 from litigators and worked under the direct supervision of Robin Greenwald.
Closer scrutiny of the IARC process reveals that it was advised by an “invited specialist,” Christopher Portier, in its work on glyphosate. At the same time Mr. Portier was working for the agency, he was being paid by the Environmental Defense Fund, an anti-pesticide group. Moreover, Mr. Portier received $160,000 from law firms suing over glyphosate. When asked about this potential conflict of interest, Mr. Portier initially claimed to be advising firms on other IARC-related lawsuits and not glyphosate litigation. He later acknowledged that his statement was wrong. It is also worth noting that Mr. Portier had no experience with glyphosate prior to his work on it for IARC.
Following Mr. Portier’s arrival at IARC, the final glyphosate study was altered in at least 10 ways to remove or reverse conclusions finding no evidence of carcinogenicity. The agency removed multiple scientists’ conclusions that studies found no link between glyphosate and cancer in lab animals and statistical analyses of studies with negative findings were turned into positive ones. The determination that glyphosate was “probably carcinogenic” was based on “limited evidence” of carcinogenicity in humans and “sufficient evidence” in experimental animals. It’s important to note that IARC puts other everyday activities like drinking hot beverages and eating red meat at the same hazard level as glyphosate exposure.
This litigation, manufactured by the plaintiffs’ bar, has enormous implications for the nation. While it may serve the financial interests of the plaintiffs’ bar, it threatens the nation’s farming industry and the country’s food sources. According to Bayer CEO Bill Anderson, the manufacturer of Roundup®, “the glyphosate litigation topic is an existential topic for our company because it does threaten to remove our ability to continue to innovate for farmers and for security.” The money companies like Bayer spend defending themselves against baseless litigation wastes significant resources that could otherwise be spent on much needed research and development.
The IARC study and Roundup® litigation are posterchildren for the need for reform and all eyes will be on the Missouri legislature to see if this is the year it finally addresses the inequities that plague the state’s civil justice system.
