Schaffner v. Monsanto Corp., 2024 U.S. App. LEXIS 20597 (U.S. Ct. of App. 3d. Cir., August 15, 2024) (Chagares, J.)
OPINION OF THE COURT
CHAGARES, Chief Judge.
This appeal presents the question of whether, once the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) registers and approves a pesticide label that omits a particular health warning, a state-law duty to include that warning is preempted by a federal statute expressly preempting any state-law pesticide labeling requirement that differs from or adds to the requirements imposed under federal law. Plaintiffs David Schaffner, Jr. and Theresa Sue Schaffner allege that defendant Monsanto Company (“Monsanto”) violated Pennsylvania law by omitting a cancer warning from the label of its weed-killer, Roundup (the “Cancer Warning”). But the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (“FIFRA”), 7 U.S.C. § 136 et seq., the federal statute that regulates pesticides such as Roundup, mandates nationwide uniformity in pesticide labeling by prohibiting states from imposing labeling requirements that are in addition to or different from the requirements imposed under FIFRA itself. This provision, Monsanto argues, preempts the Pennsylvania duty to warn that it allegedly breached. Because regulations promulgated to implement FIFRA require the health warnings on a pesticide’s label to conform to the proposed label approved by the EPA during the registration process (the “Preapproved Label”), and because during Roundup’s registration process the EPA approved proposed labels omitting a cancer warning following an extensive review of scientific evidence concerning Roundup’s possible carcinogenicity, we conclude that the alleged state-law duty to include the Cancer Warning on Roundup’s label (the “Pa. Duty to Warn”) imposes requirements that are different from those imposed under FIFRA, and that it is therefore preempted by FIFRA.
…the issue presented by this case, which is clearly of general interest, has yet to be decided by the highest court capable of resolving it — the United States Supreme Court. We therefore follow the Second Restatement in exercising our “broad discretion to determine when to apply non-mutual offensive [issue preclusion].” We decline to apply issue preclusion and instead develop the law of express preemption under FIFRA ourselves.
…hold that the parallel-requirements test must involve a comparison to the Preapproval Regulation, and having so held we apply the test. While the Cancer Warning was allegedly required by the Pa. Duty to Warn, it was omitted from Roundup’s Preapproved Label and could not have been added to the Roundup label without violating the Preapproval Regulation. Accordingly, the Pa. Duty to Warn is not equivalent to the Federal Comparator, and it is thus preempted under section 136v(b).
We conclude that neither issue preclusion nor administrative law provides a basis upon which to affirm the MDL Court’s ruling that the Schaffners’ failure-to-warn claim is not preempted under FIFRA. As to issue preclusion, we adopt section 29(7) of the Second Restatement. A court has discretion to decline to apply issue preclusion if the “issue is one of law and treating it as conclusively determined would inappropriately foreclose opportunity for obtaining reconsideration of the legal rule upon which it was based.” Restatement (Second) of Judgments § 29 (Am. L. Inst. 1982). For that reason, we do not apply issue preclusion in this case. The complex subject of preemption under FIFRA has not been comprehensively analyzed in prior caselaw, and the Supreme Court has yet to address FIFRA preemption in the specific circumstances presented by this case. Independently evaluating the merits of Monsanto’s preemption arguments therefore advances our “function of developing the law.”
As to those preemption arguments, our analysis differs from that of the MDL Court — and of our colleagues in other courts who have agreed with its conclusion — chiefly in how we define the Federal Comparator that must be employed in applying the parallel-requirements test. We hold that the Preapproval Regulation prohibits modifying the health warnings on a pesticide’s Preapproved Label, including by adding the Cancer Warning; that this prohibition constitutes a “requirement” for the purposes of section 136v(b); and that when we apply the parallel-requirements test the Federal Comparator must incorporate this regulatory requirement rather than incorporating only the statutory definition of misbranding. This approach best achieves Congress’s stated aim of uniformity in pesticide labeling. And the parallel-requirements test is not satisfied when the Pa. Duty to Warn and the Federal Comparator are compared under this approach: they are not equivalent because Monsanto’s alleged violation of the Pa. Duty to Warn does not constitute a violation of the Preapproval Regulation. We thus conclude that the Schaffners’ failure-to-warn claim is preempted under section 136v(b).
For these reasons, we will reverse the judgment of the District Court.
