Every residence hall at Warren College carries the weight of constitutional history. Stewart, Frankfurter, and Harlan house first-year students in traditional dormitory settings. The apartments for second-year students honor Black, Brennan, Douglas, and Goldberg. These are not arbitrary choices: each name belongs to a justice who sat on the Supreme Court with Chief Justice Earl Warren during his transformative tenure from 1953 to 1969. Students walking to their rooms pass through a living civics lesson, though some may never notice they are sleeping in buildings named for the architects of Brown v. Board of Education and the expansion of individual rights.

Two pieces from UC San Diego's renowned Stuart Collection anchor Warren's public spaces. On the engineering quad, 'Bear' by Tim Hawkinson rises in massive stone form, completed in 2005 and affectionately nicknamed 'Bearl' by students who could not resist the portmanteau of 'Bear' and 'Earl.' More startling is 'Fallen Star,' completed in 2012 atop the engineering building. Korean artist Do Ho Suh designed the slanted cottage to evoke the disorientation of the immigrant experience, accessible from Jacobs Hall's eighth floor. The house tilts at an angle that makes visitors grip handrails instinctively, a physical manifestation of the feeling of being suddenly displaced in an unfamiliar world.

Warren has become the college of choice for engineering students, though not by design. Its general education requirements happen to mesh well with engineering degree programs, requiring fewer units in areas that might conflict with heavy technical course loads. The Programs of Concentration system asks students to complete two sets of six courses outside their major's discipline, creating breadth across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Engineering students instead complete two area studies of three courses each. The practical result: engineering buildings like Jacobs Hall and the Qualcomm Institute cluster near Warren's residential heart, creating a walkable campus within a campus.

Warren occupies a unique geographic position at UC San Diego. Since 2020, it has been the only college not located on Ridge Walk, the path that overlooks the coastline. Instead, Warren sits near the canyon, an ecological reserve filled with eucalyptus trees and hiking trails. The Canyon Vista Marketplace takes its name from this location, its dining hall overlooking the green ravine. Notable among campus dining options, Canyon Vista is the only UC San Diego dining hall certified to serve halal food, operating stations including Fusion Grill, Three-Sixty, Fresh, and Earl's Coffeehouse. The campus becomes a village complete with its own dining district.

The college's namesake presents a complex legacy. Earl Warren presided over the Court that decided Brown v. Board of Education, yet he also served as California's attorney general during the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II. In 2023, the assistant dean noted that promotional materials might need to treat the Warren name with sensitivity given this history. The controversy reflects a broader institutional shift: UC San Diego's Sixth College, opened in 2001, remains unnamed more than two decades later. A 2023 naming committee for new campus buildings explicitly avoided naming structures after individuals, citing the 'controversies that often arise from naming after people, since people are complex, multifaceted, and imperfect by nature.'