David Spence teaches in the School of Law at The University of Texas at Austin, as well as the Department of Business, Government, and Society in the McCombs School of Business. He holds the Rex G. Baker Centennial Chair in Natural Resources Law and the Herbert D. Kelleher Centennial Professorship in Business Law.

Spence specializes in energy law, administrative law, environmental law, and oil and gas. His research focuses on the law and politics of energy regulation, broadly defined. He is a co-author of the leading energy law casebook, Energy, Economics and the Environment, and has published numerous scholarly articles on energy policy, regulation, and the regulatory process in both the fossil fuel and clean energy sectors.

He received a B.A. from Gettysburg College, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University, and a J.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.