Practical philosophy is currently a worldwide mainstream philosophical approach, which has already formed mature understanding, concepts, classifications and research methods. Although the introduction of practical philosophy to China was focused on Marxism in the first place, Chinese scholars are now embarking on the construction of practical philosophy of their own. Legal philosophy has always been a branch of practical philosophy from the beginning, and doing legal philosophy from the vast viewpoint of practical philosophy is a general trend by which legal philosophy in China has been influenced. That is to say, there exists a practical philosophical turn in the Chinese legal philosophy. This article aims at providing a literature review of this turn and meanwhile reflecting upon its deficiencies and pointing out its prospects as well. Under the influence of practical philosophy, there are four trends in the Chinese academic circles of legal philosophy. The first trend is to put forward some general legal theories, such as ″practical jurisprudence,″ ″practical legal philosophy,″ ″practical view of law,″ and it is clearly declared that these researches are based on practical philosophy and try to make ″Chinese″ contributions to practical philosophy of law to some extent. The second one is to adopt the method of practical philosophy to discuss many specific issues, such as rights, rule of law, legal reasoning, authority and so on, without explicitly describing themselves as practical philosophy. Chen Jinghui and Fan Libo are the two outstanding representative scholars. The third one exists in the field of applied legal philosophy (also called special legal philosophy, as distinguished from general legal philosophy). Those scholars either directly draw on the resources of practical philosophy (such as practical hermeneutics) or theories of general legal philosophy mentioned above (such as practical view of law), or consciously construct theories of applied legal philosophy according to practical philosophy. The last one emerges from the movement of China School of Rule of Law Practice; in contrast to the first three trends, it changes the previous research mode of pure theory and proposes new approaches of practice, experiment and positivism. Admittedly, these researches have their own deficiencies, and to some extent are still in the primary state of consuming the fruits of foreign theories, showing a lack of originality. However, they are of great significance to philosophy of law in China: they have broken the old research pattern, changed its temperament, and even given a new life to it. Therefore, at the last part of this article three possible directions in the future are optimistically described: to preserve the great ambition to make Chinese contributions, to strengthen the coherence between theory and practice, and to advocate pluralistic and mutually supporting methods of researches.