The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear a dispute involving a lawsuit against Bayer AG’s Monsanto Co. charity and third party unrelated to the litigation.
The judges rejected the appeal of Anna St. John, a lawyer who opposed an agreement for Monsanto to pay more than $39 million to settle claims that the company fraudulently labeled some products with Roundup weedkiller. The lower courts rejected the challenge of St. John, who opposed the settlement because $14 to $16 million of the award would go to consumer non-profit groups and a university that were not harmed by the company’s alleged wrongdoing.
At issue in the case are so-called “cy pres” (pronounced “see pray”) awards in class action lawsuits that direct money that may not be earned or may not be distributed to members of the class to unrelated entities as long as it is in the interest of the complainants.
Critics say such awards encourage frivolous lawsuits and excessive fees to go to class action lawyers who may be seeking to benefit their own interests. Proponents say these settlements could put low per capita awards to good use by benefiting groups that work for the public good or support underfunded entities.
The Supreme Court in 2019 refrained from addressing a challenge to cy pres awards in a case involving Google. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, who dissented in the case, called the cy pres settlements “unjust and unreasonable.”
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The plaintiffs sued in 2019 on behalf of a proposed national class of individuals who purchased some of the company’s Roundup weedkiller products with what they say was a deceptive label. Monsanto and the plaintiffs defended the settlement as both sides continued efforts to reach as many consumers as possible to file a claim — even increasing fees to generate more claims. claim – before any remaining money is available for distribution in cy pres.
Class members filed more than 240,000 claims totaling more than $13 million. The settlement proposed three cy pre recipients, including the National Consumer Law Center, the National Advertising Division of the Better Business Bureau, and the Center for Consumer Law & Economic Justice at the University of California, Berkeley.
St. John, the only individual to object to the settlement, is an attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute’s Center for Class Action Fairness, which also represented him in the case. Monsanto called the group, which advocates against what it considers abusive class-action practices, a “serial objector of class-action settlements.”
The group said in court papers that additional measures could have been distributed in the settlement award to class members. In addition, it says that the cy pres distribution violates the rights of St. John’s freedom of speech under the US Constitution’s First Amendment because the selected recipients would subsidize “left-leaning organizations” that “acted against his political beliefs.”
A federal judge rejected St. John and approved the settlement, a decision supported by the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals based in St. Louis, Missouri last year.
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