A partner and vice president at Baum, Hedlund, Aristei, and Goldman, R. Brent Wisner helped represent plaintiffs who won landmark judgments against Monsanto. Because of their significance, R. Brent Wisner has been invited to speak on the cases at high-profile institutions such as Yale University.
Before his talk at Yale, students were already involved with an initiative that would address the impact of Monsanto’s agro-chemical business globally. A group of Yale law students traveled to the Netherlands in 2016 to take part in the Monsanto Tribunal, an international initiative whose purpose was to hold Monsanto accountable for what it alleged were violations of human rights and crimes against humanity. The tribunal’s purpose was to help advance humanitarian and human rights laws. Teams investigated whether the company engaged in activities that violated rights to a healthy, sustainable environment as defined by international laws governing human rights. This tribunal met long before the cases in California came to trial and were settled. Because of the size of the awards in the Monsanto cases in California ($289 million in one case and over $2 billion in the other), and the fact that the court found the company to be both negligent and to act with malice, these landmark cases might ultimately have global implications for the corporation. To add to its problems, it is presently facing similar complaints from several thousand people in separate cases.
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