tlm,
Nope. Of course common sense would tell you that "" doesn't imply a paragraph, but reading perlvar it seems Perl made a special case to solve your paragraph slurping problems.

Setting it to "\n\n" means something slightly different than setting to "" , if the file contains consecutive empty lines. Setting to "" will treat two or more consecutive empty lines as a single empty line. Setting to "\n\n" will blindly assume that the next input character belongs to the next paragraph, even if it's a newline. (Mnemonic: / delimits line boundaries when quoting poetry.)

Added snippet from referenced doc