Treble damages are a legislative penalty enhancement found in specific statutes, most notably federal antitrust law and many state consumer protection and RICO statutes, where the actual damages a jury finds are automatically multiplied by three once liability is established. The purpose is deterrence: because many violations are hard to detect and prove, lawmakers set recovery well above actual harm to make enforcement worthwhile and to punish intentional misconduct.

Treble damages are typically mandatory once the underlying statutory violation is proven, unlike punitive damages, which usually require a separate showing of malice or reckless conduct and are subject to constitutional proportionality review. Because trebling applies to the actual damages figure, disputes in these cases often focus heavily on the size of the underlying compensatory number, since that number becomes the multiplier's base.

Juricratic models a treble-damages statute as a deterministic post-processing rule applied to the simulated compensatory damages distribution, so a user can see both the underlying actual-damages range a jury might find and the multiplied exposure that follows automatically once liability crosses the line.

Antitrust and RICO plaintiffs plead treble damages to increase settlement leverage and to make otherwise marginal claims economically worth pursuing, while defendants in these statutes focus disproportionate resources on defeating the underlying liability finding, since a loss triggers automatic trebling rather than a discretionary punitive award.