This article compares the ways in which judges in Denmark communicate punishment to defendants in common assault cases, and in very serious cases where the prosecution has claimed an indeterminate sentence. Danish judges generally take on a reserved role during trial, and they depend on a range of other professionals to make their judgement, thus ‘morally outsourcing’ their judgement to other experts such as psychiatrists, psychologists and probationers. Communication in the court cases we observed is thus shaped by affiliated professional actors’ written evaluations as much as it is by what goes on inside the court. These findings have implications for researchers embarking on fieldwork in courts in the sense that it is neither possible nor desirable to draw clear distinctions between spoken and written communication. Hence, the richest data on moral communication might be found in among what is said and written. The tacit knowledge of the professionals in a court setting is intertwined with other experts’ knowledge and can thus not be understood in a vacuum. Our main argument is that if we wish to understand communication in courts, we need to expand our analytical framework beyond their parameters