Bayer’s Monsanto unit stood before a Missouri judge on Monday and asked him to approve a $7.25 billion settlement of roughly 65,000 lawsuits claiming its Roundup weed killer causes cancer. Judge Timothy Boyer heard arguments from both sides in St. Louis and didn’t rule from the bench. But the settlement he’s weighing already looks different from what it did in May. That’s because the Supreme Court spent its June term teaching a lesson most of us learned in eighth-grade civics and then promptly forgot: When federal law and state law collide, federal law wins. It’s called the supremacy clause, and it just did more to reshape Roundup litigation than any jury verdict could.

The case is Monsanto Co. v. Durnell, decided 7-2 on June 25. A Missouri jury had awarded John Durnell $1.25 million after he blamed his non-Hodgkin lymphoma on Roundup and argued the label should have carried a cancer warning. The interesting part, and a good fact for your next dinner party, is who signed on to reverse that verdict. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote the majority, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Clarence Thomas, as you’d expect, but also by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. The dissent came from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court’s most reliable textualist, siding against Monsanto. Nobody’s ideological bingo card called that one.