This one might be interesting only to people who live in San Diego and who shop at the Fashion Valley Mall. But since that's an appreciable fraction of my friends and neighbors, I'll mention it.
Otherwise, it's a boring, fact-specific tax case about whether a particular transaction resulted in the transfer of 50% versus 100% of the mall (and hence changed its tax basis). On the upside -- at least for residents of San Diego -- the County of San Diego wins in the Court of Appeal, which means several more million dollars per year in taxes from the owners of the mall.
So I figure all we gotta do is win another thousand or so of these cases and, poof, San Diego's budget problems will be solved. (On the downside, the law firm that structured this transaction in an unsuccessful attempt to avoid taxes is probably pretty unhappy today.)
