In re: Roundup Products Liability Litigation
- Vince Chhabria
- 3:21-cv-02910
- U.S. District Court · Northern District of California
- 3
In Kelly-Leppert v. Monsanto, Judge Chhabria’s case was remanded by the multidistrict panel to Missouri.
Consuela E. Kelly-Leppert’s action was sent from the Roundup multidistrict litigation in the Northern District of California back to the Eastern District of Missouri, where it was originally filed.
What happened
In Kelly-Leppert v. Monsanto Company, Consuela E. Kelly-Leppert, representing herself, asked the multidistrict litigation panel to cancel an earlier conditional remand order. The case had been transferred from the Eastern District of Missouri to the Roundup multidistrict litigation in the Northern District of California.
Kelly-Leppert argued that her deceased husband’s medical history supported non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma rather than colorectal cancer. She also raised concerns about possible bias in Missouri and asked to continue the case as a standalone action in California. The panel said it would not decide the medical merits and rejected those arguments as reasons to keep the case in the multidistrict proceedings.
The panel ordered the case remanded to the Eastern District of Missouri, where it was originally filed. It also said Kelly-Leppert could present her request for appointed counsel to that court after remand. The order identifies Judge Vince Chhabria as the judge associated with the case.
The detailed version
- In re: Roundup Products Liability Litigation · No. 3:21-cv-02910
- Vince Chhabria
- Dec. 12, 2025
Background
Consuela E. Kelly-Leppert, who was proceeding without a lawyer, moved under Panel Rule 10.2 to vacate the multidistrict litigation panel’s order conditionally remanding her action to the Eastern District of Missouri. No party responded to the motion.
Kelly-Leppert originally filed the action in the Eastern District of Missouri in 2021. The panel later transferred it to the Northern District of California for pretrial proceedings in the Roundup multidistrict litigation. The transferee judge recommended remand because Kelly-Leppert alleged that her deceased husband had been diagnosed with colorectal cancer rather than non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, making further litigation of the case in the multidistrict proceedings less useful.
Arguments and analysis
Kelly-Leppert argued that her husband’s clinical presentation supported a non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosis. The panel declined to evaluate the competing descriptions of his medical history, explaining that its authority under 28 U.S.C. § 1407 did not extend to deciding the merits of the case. The panel also declined to second-guess the transferee court’s conclusion that continuing the case in the multidistrict litigation would not be efficient.
Kelly-Leppert separately argued that the Eastern District of Missouri presented concerns involving venue bias and corporate influence because Monsanto is headquartered there. The panel said that this was not an appropriate basis to deny remand. The panel also explained that Kelly-Leppert had misunderstood the procedural posture: she requested a standalone case in the Northern District of California, but the action had originally been filed in Missouri.
Ruling
The panel ordered that the action be remanded to the Eastern District of Missouri. It explained that Section 1407 requires cases transferred for multidistrict pretrial proceedings to return to the district where they were originally filed once those proceedings have ended. The panel also said Kelly-Leppert could present her pending request for appointment of counsel to the Eastern District of Missouri after remand.
The order did not decide whether Kelly-Leppert’s medical-diagnosis allegations or underlying Roundup claims were legally or factually meritorious. The case’s listed judge is Vince Chhabria, while the remand ruling was issued by the United States Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.