As a technical legal matter, a wrongful death claim is not a tort claim. In most, if not all states in the United States, there was no common law right to recover civil damages for the wrongful death of a person. However, now the states have each enacted statutes to correct this deficiency in the law so that there is a right to such recovery. It is true that the issue of liability will be determined by the tort law of a given state, but this is only because the statute incorporates the tort law as the law of liability. For this reason, a wrongful death claim does share much in common with a tort claim, but it is still grounded in statute; not common law tort.